Fire has always been Katherine Fairbanks's gift to fear, not use ? until a blaze tears through her late parents' long-empty cottage, and the flames curl toward her hand like recognition.
The fire claims a quiet, beloved neighbor and uncovers an archive thirty years in the keeping, tied to the night Daniel and Violet Fairbanks never came home. For the first time, Katherine doesn't investigate alone. Holly reads the weather closing in. Anna listens to what the scorched earth remembers. Lily asks the water what it's been hiding. And Katherine, who has spent her life holding everyone else together, finally lets her sisters hold her.
As Fairbanks Cove counts down to its Halloween festival, a second death makes one thing clear: the fire was no accident, and someone in town has been making small, irreversible choices for twenty-five years.
With a state fire marshal who won't look away, a town that would rather not look too closely, and Milo watching from the warm hood of the car ? Katherine has to decide how much truth Fairbanks Cove can survive.
