TETHERED
By Ajona Penhart

Some memories are buried for a reason. But the truth never stays dead.

When Cairo Mends receives a call from a Montana sheriff about his estranged mother's suicide, he is thrust back into the haunted house of his childhood—and the depths of a trauma he thought he'd buried. His sister Liane, an artist with a gift for destruction and secrets she can't explain, joins him to settle their mother's estate. But the decaying house in Pine Ridge holds more than old ghosts.

As the siblings uncover journals, recordings, and the remnants of their mother's descent into paranoia, a chilling truth begins to emerge: the long-forgotten disappearance of eleven-year-old Sophia Crane may not have been forgotten at all. And their mother wasn't crazy—she was covering for them.

Drawn into a spiraling investigation of their own past, Cairo and Liane must confront the buried memories of a summer in 1997 that ended in blood, betrayal, and a secret grave in the woods. But as fragments of their childhood resurface, so too do the echoes of guilt, manipulation, and the terrifying possibility that one of them may be a killer.

TETHERED is a haunting psychological suspense novel that asks: what would you do if your past came home to bury you?