The Seer's Spread

I. Box of Secrets

Ethan stared at the yellow box with the words Whitman's Sampler looping across the lid. He knew there wasn't a single vanilla caramel or molasses chew inside. "One day I might let you have a look under that lid, Ethan Wate," Amma had said after she caught him poking around the candy box when he was seven. "But today isn't the day."

The contents of the Whitman's Sampler box remained one of the many mysteries about the woman who helped raise Ethan—like Amma's actual age (his dad estimated between seventy and eighty when she died, but no one had ever been brave enough to ask while she was alive); the secret ingredient in her fried-chicken batter (Link thought he'd narrowed it down to red pepper, bacon drippings, or Old Red's Seasoning Salt, none of which seemed exactly right); and the reason Amma had knocked on the door of Wate's Landing and moved in the day Ethan's parents brought him home from the hospital (his mom maintained it was because Amma didn't think Lila knew anything about babies, but Amma claimed it was because she couldn't stand the thought of Ethan being raised on frozen biscuits and store-bought pie).

And now that she was gone for good, no one would ever know.

Ethan ran his hand over the faded cardboard and turned to his girlfriend, who was sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor next to him, scratching words into one of her notebooks as she twirled her black curls. "Why would Amma leave me her box? Why not my dad?"

Ethan hadn't realized he'd said the words out loud and was almost relieved when Lena seemed to be only half listening.