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Prologue

      The first lights of dawn found me wedged onto the window sill of my bedroom, which was just barely wide enough to support me. In my lap I held a book; A Thousand Days by Lucidya Reid. Though it looked like any ordinary book, this was anything but. All of my life this book had been present, ever calling to me.

      It was also the book Mama gave me the day she died.

I took a deep breath and ran my finger down the glittering yellow line that split the front cover of the book in half. On the left side of the line was a majestic gray castle glittering in the sunlight. In the distance was a rich brown stable, a horse corral in front. On the right side of the line, the castle was weathered with age, crumbling. The stone was black, the glass of the windows broken. Behind it was some sort of building, the roof gone. Around the base of the castle, on both sides of the line, were roses.

     Mama always loved roses, so it was no wonder that her favorite book had roses on the cover. When I was younger she and I used to save every shilling we could to go to the town garden once a year and spend hours in the rose section. Later, when we were rich, Mama planted her own rose garden. We spent hours a day caring for it, just the two of us. It was as we were weeding that Mama first doubled over with pain from the cancer that would, a year later, claim her life. Tears slid down my face as I remembered the day she died.

      We'd all been gathered around her bedside, just... waiting. Every few hours Mama would call one of us to her side. I was the last.

      “Belle,” her gravely voice barely managed to reach my ears, yet it still woke me. “Get me... the book.”

      I hadn't bothered to ask her which book she meant. Of course it was this one, the book I'd been asking to read since I was eight years old. When I got back I'd placed it on her lap, knowing she was took to hold it. She'd shaken her her head. “It's yours, Belle. It always has been.”

      “No, Mama, I...”

      “Please, Belle, just take it.”

      Struggling to hold back tears, I'd nodded and picked it back up.

      “You have to promise me something, Belle.”

      “Anything, Mama.”

      “Promise that you won't read it until your eighteenth birthday. Promise your dying mother.”

      Unable to speak, I'd only nodded.

      A smile had touched Mama's cracked lips as she'd slipped back into slumber.

      That was the last time I'd ever spoken to my mother.

      So much has changed since then. Devastated over Mama's death, Papa had turned to drinking. My siblings and I had done everything we could to keep the family business afloat, but without Papa there was only so much we could do. Within a matter of months, we were bankrupt. Only when we were very nearly bankrupt did Papa sober up. We sold everything we owned—except Mama's book—and moved almost entirely across the country to a small town called Sparrow's Nest. Papa got a job doing accounts for a real estate company, but it still wasn't enough to pay for all of our debts, so the rest of the family got what ever jobs they could as well.

      Which leads me back to my window sill the morning of my eighteenth birthday. As the sun poked it's first rays over the mountains I at last opened the cover of A Thousand Days and began to read.