Elizabeth Goodweather knows what it’s like to be an outsider, to keep secrets and nurse wounds. But Elizabeth raised a family in these mist-shrouded North Carolina hills and is deeply settled on her small farm—even finding the space to let a new man into her life. Everything changes when her daughter Rosemary returns home, determined to solve a nineteen-year-old riddle: the mysterious disappearance of her best friend, Maythorn Mullins, when the girls were just ten.
Soon Elizabeth and her daughter are prying into the strange history of the Mullins family, confronting a complex thicket of relationships and exploring a realm of magic and Cherokee legend that Maythorn shared secretly with Rosemary.
But most of all, they will discover that behind a child’s disappearance was something more evil and far closer than they ever imagined....