Still Beside Me

Mara Vale remembers the fall. She remembers the black water below. She does not remember how she survived-or why her best friend never came home. After leaving the hospital with a concussion, sixteen-year-old Mara returns to Greywick to find Wren Calder still missing and the abandoned Bellweather Reservoir poised for a celebrated reopening. Then Wren appears outside Mara's bedroom window, rain-darkened and frightened. She claims someone chased them through the powerhouse and warns Mara that no one can know she is back. Determined to expose their pursuer, the girls retrace their final night together. Their search leads through corroded controls, wooded access roads, rusted catwalks, and sealed maintenance tunnels. Burned inspection records point toward dangerous structural failures, while altered work orders cast suspicion on the people behind Bellweather's redevelopment. Councilman Adrian Rusk wants Mara silent, and her missing phone may hold the evidence he fears. With the reopening ceremony approaching, plans to flood the lower channel threaten to erase every remaining clue. Mara must enter Bellweather again, recover what the water concealed, and confront the fractured memories she has been avoiding. Yet each step closer to the truth raises a more disturbing uncertainty: why does Wren refuse to be seen, and why can no one else seem to find her? For readers of young adult supernatural suspense, ghost mysteries, and emotionally charged stories of friendship, grief, memory, and courage.