Some lies protect the people we love. Others drown everything else.
The reservoir has been going down for six months. This week it gave up the town.
Tamsin Ward reads documents for a living. Handwriting, forgeries, alterations, the faint ghost a pen leaves in paper long after the ink has been erased. She is the best in four states, and she has spent three years unable to look at the one file that matters: the insurance report that told her the husband she buried had a second phone, a rented room, and a photograph of another woman.
Then a package arrives from a county she has never visited. Inside is a 1994 survey form ? and in the margin, in her dead husband's handwriting, a question addressed to her.
T ? whose hand is this?
Cassaday County is in the worst drought on record. The lake has fallen forty-four feet, the drowned village beneath it is standing in open air for the first time since 1994, and when the bank vault comes open there is a young woman inside who everyone believed had left town thirty years ago. With her, a satchel of waterlogged paper that only one person alive can read.
Tamsin has until the gates close and the rain comes back. After that, the evidence is under seventy feet of water for another generation.
Elias Roque, the dam's safety engineer, has his own reason to want the truth ? and his own reason to fear it. As the two of them work through the night to recover what the water preserved, the survey logs give up a fraud thirty years old, a town that was relieved when a difficult young woman went quiet, and a killer who has spent three decades being the kindest person in the county.
Someone has been protecting this since 1994. They have never once had to raise their voice.
And they are already ahead of her.
A slow-burn romantic suspense with a cold case at its heart ? for readers who love small-town secrets, a fiercely capable heroine, an antagonist you almost understand, and the kind of twist that was in front of you the whole time.
Book One of The Cassaday Water. A complete story with a satisfying ending.
