Marshlight

Twelve years ago, Wenna Marlowe vanished from the house at Marlock Creek on the night her mother drowned in the tide flats. She has rebuilt her life elsewhere, in rooms that hold no salt wind and no family ghosts, but a letter from Aunt Mathilde, sealed with the old Marlowe crest, drags her back across the county line and through an iron gate whose bird finials have rusted shut on their own secrets. Almost immediately, Wenna comes face to face with Callum Ashgrove, the reed-cutter's son who once read Neruda to her on the bank and who has, impossibly, stayed. He is not the only one waiting. Theodora Vance, the reclusive neighbor who has been watching the marsh longer than anyone can recall, hints that the night of the drowning was no accident, and that something still moves in the samphire when the marsh light rises. With cousin Blythe circling the inheritance and sister Lorelei warning her to leave again before dawn, Wenna must choose between the safe forgetting she has carried for a decade and the drowned truth that calls her name across the flats. Some creeks give up their dead only when the living finally stop running.