The drive home was quiet. I sat in the back with the tree, its branches occasionally brushing against my arm. I realized then that the "strangeness" wasn't about the money. It was about the transition from being a son in a house of rules to being a man in a house of grace. Peter wasn't trying to buy our loyalty; he was just holding the door open while we figured out how to walk through it.

"It smells like Christmas," Mama said, leaning her head back against the seat.

"It smells like a forest in a Toyota," Peter grumbled, but he was smiling in the rearview mirror.

Later that night, after the Swede and Daffodil had gone to bed, I sat by the fire with a whisky I'd been saving for an occasion I hadn't yet named. The cottage was the kind of quiet that only happens after a full day—the kind where the stones themselves seem to exhale and settle.

I'd bought the tree because the boy needed to be reminded that accepting help wasn't the same as admitting defeat. I'd learned that the hard way, decades ago, when my own father had made it clear that asking for anything was weakness. The result was fifty-three years of a man who thought he had to do everything alone, who couldn't accept a hand, who died looking out a window at a life he'd spent too much energy managing instead of living.

I wasn't going to let them make that same mistake.

The fire crackled, and my eyes drifted to the old Mabinogi on the shelf—the spine cracked, the pages yellowed from decades of thumbing. I thought about the boy, Gwion Bach. The one who was never meant to receive the gift. He was just the stirrer, the nobody set to tend someone else's cauldron, watching the brew meant for someone else bubble and spit. But three drops landed on his thumb, and he put it to his mouth, the way any child would, and the whole world opened up inside him. Knowledge, sight, the Awen—the bright inspiration that Ceridwen had spent a year brewing for her own son. It was never meant for Gwion. He got it by accident. By grace.

And then came the chase. Ceridwen tearing after him through every shape he could become—hare, fish, bird, a single grain of wheat trembling on a threshing floor. She swallowed him whole. And from that swallowing, from that darkness, he was reborn. Not as what he was before. As something radiant. Taliesin. The shining brow.

I took a sip of the whisky. It burned, the kind of burn that reminded you that you were still alive, still capable of feeling.