pushed your hope chest too far and it banged into the desk and your lockbox fell off. Come see!”
Her green lockbox was on its side, empty. The interior of the lid should have had a lining draping across, but now it was sagging and showed a hollow section in the top arch. It looked like something was behind it.
“See?” Olaf pointed to the liner. “My hands can’t fit just right to pull it away, but something is behind that green stuff. Look! Look!”
Olaf wasn’t wrong. Gently, she pulled the velvet away, revealing the hollowed-out top. A canvas had been carefully hidden inside.
Elsa quickly unfolded it. She was astonished to see it was a painting.
At first glance, it looked like the portrait of her family that hung in the Great Hall. But this painting had four people in it: the king, the queen, Elsa, and another little girl.
The child was a few years younger than Elsa, and she was the spitting image of the king. She had wide-set blue eyes, bright red hair set in pigtails, and a sprinkle of freckles dotting her nose. She wore a pale green dress, and she was clutching Elsa’s arm as if she might never let go.
Elsa touched the painting and started to cry. “It’s Anna!” she said. She knew it for certain.
The memories flooded her body so quickly she felt like she was drowning.
“I remember,” Elsa said in surprise, and then she collapsed on the floor.
Thirteen Years Earlier…
The flour was everywhere.
It blanketed the floor, was sprinkled all over the wood table, and had made its way into Anna’s hair. The five-year-old didn’t mind. She lifted another scoop of flour from the jar and threw it into the air.
“It looks like snow!” Anna said as the flour rained down. One of her pigtails was falling out, even though her hair had just been done an hour earlier. “Try it, Elsa! Try it!”
“You’re making a mess.” Elsa smiled despite herself and tried to tidy up behind her.
“Princess Anna, please try to keep the flour in the bowl,” Olina begged.
“But it’s so much fun to throw, Miss Olina!” Anna said, giggling as she tossed more flour into the air.
“Why don’t you two prepare the dough and I’ll get the stove ready?” Olina suggested.
“Okay, Anna, you can come help me.” Elsa pushed a loose strand of blond hair off her face and creamed the soft butter by hand with a wooden spoon. Anna climbed up on a stool next to Elsa and watched.
Together, they added the sugar, flour, vanilla extract, and milk. They took turns stirring until the cookie mixture was a smooth pale yellow. Elsa cracked the eggs, since the last time Anna did them, she’d gotten shells in a batch of cookies they served to the king of Sondringham.
Elsa was still stirring the mixture when Anna got bored and started racing around the kitchen. Elsa laughed, abandoning her spoon and running after her. Suddenly, Mama swooped in and grabbed both of them.
“This looks wonderful, girls,” Mama said. “Your father is going to be so surprised. You know how much he loves your krumkaker.”
“Crumbs cake-r.” Anna tried hard to say the word, but she never could. “Crumb cake?”
Mama and Elsa laughed.
“Krumkaker,” Mama said, the word rolling off her tongue smoothly. “I’ve been using this recipe since I was your age. I used to bake these with my best friend.”
“That’s where you learned to bake with love,” Anna said.
“Yes, I did,” Mama agreed, fixing Anna’s right pigtail.
Together, they huddled around the stove as Olina lit it and placed the decorative two-sided iron griddle on top of the flame to heat up. Their krumkake griddle had the Arendelle coat of arms on it, a touch their father loved. Mama poured the first scoop of batter into the center of the griddle and closed it, holding it over the flame. Together, they counted to ten; then she flipped the griddle over and they counted out ten seconds again. The hardest part of the process was removing the baked dough from the griddle so they could mold it around a cone-shaped rolling pin to form the cookie. Olina and Mama never let them help with that part. Olina claimed she had calluses on her fingertips from getting burned by the griddle one too many times. But when the cookie was cool, it was removed from the cone, and that was when both girls were allowed to sprinkle it with powdered sugar. Sometimes they left the cookies hollow, and other times they