Tend the Grave

TEND THE GRAVE Some graves are kept. This one was guarded. For forty years, someone has tended an unmarked grave in the county's potter's field. Fresh flowers every October. No name, no stone, no explanation. The kind of devotion you only give to someone you loved - or someone you can't stop being afraid of. Hospice nurse June Vance has learned that the dying don't lie. So when Verlie Sloan takes June's hand in her final days and whispers one last instruction - stop the tending, it's not him - June can't let it go.The grave is supposed to hold Cordell Sloan, Verlie's husband, the man everyone says ran off to Florida in 1987 and never came back. Her son Dean has believed something worse for forty years: that he put his father in the ground himself, at fifteen, the night he stepped between Cordell and his mother. But when the state finally opens the grave, the body isn't Cordell. It's a stranger. Someone nobody reported, nobody mourned, nobody ever came looking for. Now June is holding a truth that rewrites four decades of grief - a man who spent his whole life atoning for a killing that never happened, a mother who let him, and a body that's been waiting patiently for someone to finally ask the right question. In a town that's very good at keeping its dead quiet, some kindnesses are justanother kind of lie. From the author of Say It Back.