Dead reckoning

Wren Colby restores other people's broken histories for a living. She has never once thought to question her own. When her grandmother dies eleven days before Harbor Days closes out its biggest week of the year, Wren returns to the small Maine island she grew up on to catalog a lifetime of boat logs before a brutal ten-day state deadline strips her family of the fishing license that's kept them afloat for generations. She expects paperwork. She finds a lie with three layers of ink. Thirty years ago, her aunt Josie drowned off the town dock the same week this festival began. The family has repeated the same four sentences about that morning for three decades - chaos, tragedy, nobody watching and Wren, who has aphantasia and has never pictured a single face in her life, has always trusted the written record over anyone's word. Including, until now, her own. But the tide charts don't match the story. The dock was never as crowded as everyone claims. And buried under layers of altered ink in a locked state ledger is a name that was never supposed to surface again. As Wren pieces together what actually happened the morning Josie died, she uncovers something far more dangerous than a family cover-up: the discovery that her own most trusted memory - the one she has never once doubted - was never a memory at all. A slow-burning psychological thriller about the stories families tell to survive themselves, and the far more dangerous ones we tell ourselves without ever knowing it.