Annalise Hawthorne arrived at her new house in the Pacific Northwest just as a fresh wave of rain began its daily assault. The moving truck rumbled away, leaving her standing on the porch of a two-story gray cottage, which looked determined to resist the moss creeping up its foundation.

She was thirty-four, retired from an unreasonably lucrative gig as a senior software engineer, and as of that morning, officially free from the micro-aggressions of Silicon Valley startups. Theoretically, she could fly to Bali or take up backcountry skiing, but instead she'd bought a house in a town small enough that the barista knew her name by the end of her first week.

The town of Grafton was famous for three things: Hydrangeas the size of cheerleaders' pompoms, a single stoplight at Main and Fifth, and an inordinate number of retired engineers who'd fled the cities for the promise of affordable real estate and rain. Annalise had been in her new house for a month, and already she recognized most of her neighbors by dog, if not by name.