Rilla looked at her hands—calloused from garden work and red from scrubbing. She wasn't the girl who had danced at the Four Winds lighthouse, dreaming only of her first party. She was a woman of the Red Cross, a mother to a child not her own, and a sister waiting for a miracle.
James Kitchener Anderson—her "little Jims"—was her anchor. Every time she felt the urge to succumb to the "vague, dark shadows" of the casualty lists, Jims would reach out a small, sticky hand, pulling her back to the present.
Rilla Blythe, once the frivolous youngest daughter of Anne and Gilbert, stood on the veranda, clutching a crumpled letter. The air, usually sweet with the scent of her mother’s garden, felt heavy, as if the very sky over Glen St. Mary were mourning. Her brothers were gone—Walter with his poet’s heart and Jem with his steady courage—leaving a silence in the hallways that no amount of laughter could fill.