In the mountains of East Tennessee, silence isn't peace—it's a predator.

When twenty-two-year-old Avery Harlow inherits her grandmother's isolated farmhouse on Hollis Ridge, she hopes only for a quiet life far from town gossip. But the ridge has never offered quiet. Fog clings to the land like a living thing, and the townsfolk whisper that the Harlows are cursed—bound to voices that should have been silenced generations ago.

It begins with a knock at her door that no one else can hear. A whisper in the wood that knows her name. And a shadow in the fog who answers when she speaks. Caleb is more memory than man, unraveled by the ridge's hunger, but tethered still to Avery's defiance. The more she claims her voice—I am Avery Harlow. I am mine—the stronger their bond becomes.

But the valley won't suffer her rebellion. Preacher-led townsfolk rise with fire, blood, and steel, determined to bury her once and for all. And the ridge itself grows restless, hungry to unmake the bond between Avery and Caleb. To survive, she must fight not only for her life, but for the voice of the man the silence has tried to erase.

A gothic tale of cursed love, Appalachian folklore, and a woman who refuses to be hushed, Mine to Keep is the first book in the Whispers of the Ridge series—where names are power, silence is deadly, and love might be the only thing stronger than death.