RELEASE DATE: 15 May 2020
She plays in the meadow, the only place safe to cry about her mother’s death. He finds her there, the wide-eyed boy, thrown by his horse, lost in the woods.
She guides him home, in the process finding the road out of her grief—and a friend.
But then she discovers his true identity. And everything changes.
A hopeful fairy tale retelling for people who still believe in the transformative power of love.
Courting the Winter Prince
It wasn’t a storybook romance. not in the way people imagined.
There was no fairy godmother. No magical mice. Nothing but a few dusty gowns hanging in the attic and stolen, midnight moments stitching a dream by candlelight.
I wasn’t sure if anyone would understand if I tried to explain why I needed to go to the ball. It wasn’t for the dress. It certainly wasn’t because I thought I should have a crown.
I did it for friendship… and love.
Years ago, just after mother died, I ran deep into the woods, driven half by sorrow and half by despair. In the deep, mountain woods that smelled of rain, and earth, and pine, there was a meadow of flowers where I could cry. I pictured my bones there, bleached by the sun and shrouded by the brown dress that was all that remained of my family’s fortune. Everything else had been sold to buy medicine for mother. To buy hope. To buy time.
He found me there, in the dead of night, a wide-eyed boy who’d been thrown by his horse and gotten lost in the woods.
I lived because he wanted to go home, because he said it was important. I knew the woods well and by morning I was hungry and thirsty enough to stop weeping long enough to save a stranger.