Where You Park Your Keys

A bus pushes through fog so thick it swallows the road behind it, depositing Cass Winters at a plastic bench in Gullhaven, Oregon, a town so small most maps have stopped noticing it. She carries one bag, no explanation, and the unsettling conviction that she has finally arrived somewhere she cannot be followed. Gullhaven is the kind of place that watches. Mari Vasquez, who runs the only diner, asks questions between coffee refills. Denny Okafor, who knows everyone's movements before they make them, watches Cass the way a man watches weather. Old Pete sits on his porch and says nothing that isn't useful. Theo Lind offers a job at the garage and a key to a cottage nobody else wanted. And Rhea Calloway, who came to town once and never left, knows exactly what it looks like when a woman arrives running. Cass wants only to disappear into the ordinary, to fix engines, to mind her own business, to forget where she parked her keys and why. But Gullhaven keeps its own records, and the past she left behind has a postal code now. When a body surfaces in the river fog and the questions start arriving in pairs, Cass must decide whether to keep hiding or to finally stop. Some keys are meant to be lost. Some turn the lock from the other side.