Every forty-seven days, someone in Marrow Falls stops being lucky. A barn fire. A tractor rollover. An eighty-one-year-old man at the bottom of his own stairs. The sheriff calls them accidents. Joss Calder counts the days between them, and the days do not vary.
Joss came to Kestrel County to stop seeing things. In Seattle she found a danger in a building nobody else could see, wrote the report, and watched it get buried. Eleven people died. She lost the job, the career, and any reason to trust the one thing her mind has always been good at. Now she's living alone in her dead grandmother's house at the edge of a town that calls her "that Calder girl," trying very hard to be wrong about everything for the rest of her life. Then she opens her grandmother's logbooks, and finds thirty-two years of evidence hidden between the botanical sketches.
Deputy Cole Bennett is the first person to ask what her numbers mean instead of what's wrong with her. He's also the man who signed off on the last death as an accident, working for a sheriff who's been feeding a land company everything it needs. Joss knows better than to want him. She wants him anyway.
What you're in for
- A woman nobody believes, and a pattern only she can see
- A protector with a badge he's one question away from losing
- Forbidden attraction that costs both of them something real, told as a slow burn with no explicit content
- A dead grandmother's notebooks and thirty-two years of evidence no one read
- A town where quiet is not the same thing as safe
Some patterns don't end. They move.