Dr. Nora Carter has built a career teaching other people how to heal, but one disastrous live television interview exposes how little control she has over her own past. When a lawyer contacts her about boxes left in the attic of Ravenwood House, the Louisiana home where she spent troubled childhood summers, Nora slips away from Dallas and returns to Cypress Hollow hoping to retrieve one dangerous piece of history before anyone else finds it. Instead, a drought is draining the bayou and bringing long-buried evidence to the surface. Steel barrels containing human remains have been discovered in the mud, a local teacher is missing, and the town is swarming with reporters, police, and people who remember exactly who Nora used to be. The deeper she digs into the attic and her fractured memories, the harder it becomes to separate the town's new nightmare from the secrets her mother and sister carried out of Cypress Hollow twenty years earlier. Old photographs, a submerged car, a childhood safe word, and the reappearance of Cole Fontenot, the boy Nora once trusted more than anyone, pull her toward questions she has spent her adult life avoiding. Every answer threatens her reputation, her family history, and the carefully constructed story she tells herself about survival. In a place where everyone knows everyone and silence can last for generations, Nora must decide how much truth she is willing to expose before the person protecting the darkest secret realizes she is getting too close. The bayou is still giving up secrets.
Dr. Nora Carter has built a career teaching other people how to heal, but one disastrous live television interview exposes how little control she has over her own past. When a lawyer contacts her about boxes left in the attic of Ravenwood House, the Louisiana home where she spent troubled childho...