Bob Davis closed up his store the afternoon of Christmas Eve, climbed into his truck and began his journey to visit his older sister Kate and her five children. He'd not been to the farm in three months -- the night of Addie's sixteenth birthday -- and hadn't intended to go there for Christmas, but he'd received a letter from Kate last week that had changed his mind.

Kate and the children were the only family he had. His parents and four other siblings had died in a house fire that Kate and Bob had escaped because they'd snuck out of the house to play hide-n-go-seek. They'd been five and seven at the time, and their Aunt Helen, a spinster school-teacher, took them in and raised them. She'd passed away seven years after Kate married John. A month later Bob joined the army and the war came and everything changed.

John had died in France three months before Hitler, while Bob returned after the bomb was dropped. Kate and the children welcomed him with open arms and he'd stayed for a month before moving to Charlotte, where he opened a store with Stanley Potts, a buddy from the war. He'd sent money to Kate over the past five years and she'd been able to keep the farm, which had belonged to John's parents, and she and the kids, while still dirt poor, were making it. And her marriage tomorrow to Eli Hansen, John's first cousin, would only slightly improve things. Eli had six young children of his own.

Thus, the wedding wasn't the only reason Bob was going home; and as he drew closer to Kate's, he went back over the letter he'd sent to Addie two days before.