The Garden of Drowned Hours

When Ferry Captain Aldric carries Cassia Wren across the black water to Greyhallow one final time, she arrives to find the town veiled in its familiar shroud of mist, and a stranger waiting on the pier where her grandmother once stood. Rowan Blackthorn tends a garden that only lives after dark, blooming in the drowning hours when the moon forgets to rise, and he is the only one willing to speak the name of the woman whose letters Cassia has carried across the water, sealed with strange, water-warped confessions she has read until the ink ran into her dreams. The deeper Cassia wades into the garden's living dark, the more she comes to depend on the riddle-speaking figure called Roots at the iron gate, the reclusive ferryman who swears no traveler returns after nine, and the absent voice of her dearest Dara, who writes from somewhere she insists is neither living nor lost. But every hour Cassia spends in Greyhallow is an hour she cannot reclaim, and the garden keeps exacting its toll. To uncover what was taken from her family, and what was buried with her grandmother's secrets, she must learn to give the same back. A haunting romance about memory, debt, and the people we cannot leave behind, set in a town where the past refuses to stay buried and the fog never quite lifts.