The Frost Beneath
Damian Frost has spent his life outrunning the gravity of Briar Lane, a remote mountain road where, before he could form memories, something went terribly wrong. Now, holding a deed to a house he never asked for and a past he cannot fully recall, he makes the seventeen-mile climb into the dark, where his GPS goes blank and the only map left is the one drawn into his bones. The empty house is not empty. The mountain is not quiet. And the cold that settles into Briar Lane is not the kind that any season can explain. As the frost thickens, Damian is pulled into the tangled histories of Maren Cole, a woman bound to the place by grief; Evangeline Mott, whose knowing eyes suggest she has waited a long time; and the broken orbits of the Breck and Frost families, whose secrets run deeper than the snow. With each night, the house reveals something new, a child's laughter where no child stands, a door that opens from the inside, a name scratched into the wallpaper. Damian came looking for an inheritance. What he finds is a debt. To survive the winter, he will have to confront what really happened on Briar Lane before he was old enough to speak, and what has been waiting, patient and patient, for him to come home. Some inheritances are passed down. Others refuse to let go.