The Hollow Ferns
A letter hidden beneath a floorboard for decades pulls Hazel Crewe into a web of family secrets she never knew existed. When she discovers the envelope while patching up her Back Bay apartment, the careful life she has built , quiet, orderly, entirely her own , begins to unravel thread by thread. The letter bears no return address, only a name: someone the Crewe family has never spoken of in Hazel's lifetime. As she traces the paper trail through Boston's older neighborhoods, she is drawn into the orbit of her relatives and their long-standing acquaintances , the watchful Constance Mallery and her husband Aldous, the reclusive collector Edwin Voss, the sharp-tongued Etta Pemberton, and old Wendell Hargrove, who seems to know far more than he is willing to say. Each conversation peels back another layer of a silence that has held the family together for generations. With her brother Nolan and their quiet cousin Theo watching from the edges, and unlikely allies in the form of Silas Greaves, Lottie Mae Trevaine, Maeve Tully, and the enigmatic Gilda Roan, Hazel must decide how far she is willing to dig. Because some buried letters were meant to stay buried , and the truth they carry may cost her the only family she has left.