The Hush Before Larkspur

Margot Halloway arrives at the Halloway estate on the worst night of the year, carrying a brass key she has never used and a notebook full of her grandmother Agnes's unfinished sentences. The village of Larkspur has no welcome left for the Halloway name, but the house is waiting. So is Eunice Craven, the housekeeper who never left, and Father Bramwell Quill, the priest who has been hearing confessions from something other than his congregation. Inside the valise, wrapped in lavender and mothballs, Agnes's journal begins where Agnes herself stopped writing , at the edge of a name she could not bring herself to record. As the rain thickens and the roads vanish, Margot learns that the tallied procession has been counting toward her since the night she was born, and that the figure pacing the garden wears the face she has not yet seen in any mirror. Each page she turns unlocks another door her grandmother sealed, and each door lets something further into the house. The voice on the landing is patient. The voice in the ledger is older. And somewhere beneath the floorboards, a preserved child waits to be named. Margot can flee before dawn and abandon the journal to the fire, or she can read the final entry , the one Agnes wrote in a hand that is no longer hers , and learn what the Hush has been keeping for three generations of Halloway women.