The Ten Thousand Doors of January

January finally makes it to Ninley, Kentucky, and finds the Larson farm, where her mother grew up. By now, she is truly a vagabond, and realizes she’s who she always wanted to be: “my seven-year-old self […] would’ve been rather taken with my seventeen-year-old self” (311). When Aunt Lizzie opens the door and sees January, she mistakenly identifies January as Ade at first. Aunt Lizzie has been waiting all these years, hoping Ade would come back. She tells January stories about Ade as a girl, and that she wishes she and her sisters had never sold the hayfield.

As January recounts her childhood to Aunt Lizzie and talks about visiting Kentucky as a child in 1901, she realizes Lizzie said the property buyer also visited in 1901. All the pieces fall together. Locke is the one who met Ade at church, asked her about the ghost boy from another world, bought the property, and closed her mother’s Door. All this time, Locke knew about the Larson farm and the Door on the property. When January opened the blue Door as a little girl, he could have told Julian how to get back to Ade, but instead destroyed it.

January suddenly remembers the letter she sent to Locke.