Prince Rupert, 1949. After years at a coastal residential school, sixteen-year-old Ila steps off the ferry and learns her beloved aunt Ada has been taken to Miller Bay—the TB hospital across the water that swallows names. Visits are "complicated." Mail goes missing. The law says patients who leave must be returned.

Ila begins to write anyway. Her letters travel by laundry cart and outfall pipe; Ada's diary pages come back stitched into hems. A young tug-hand with a TB scar and a rookie nurse with a braided conscience join Ila's quiet revolt. Together they map tides, decode curtains, and measure the weight of a signature.

Told in luminous, breath-short chapters—interleaved with letters and secret diary pages—The Quiet Ward at Miller Bay is a story of consent and witness, of love that refuses to whisper. For readers of Five Little Indians, The Night Watchman, and Indian Horse, this novel honors the families who kept names alive when policy tried to file them away.