The Stillwater Lake- What Mother Knew

A woman returns to her childhood home after her mother's death. Her twin sister vanished twenty years ago. The house knows what happened. And Maya's memory is the only thing standing between her and the truth.Maya Moreau built a life far from Stillwater. A successful architecture career in Chicago. A controlled world of clean lines and locked doors. She buried her past and never looked back. Until the phone rings at 2:00 a.m.Her mother is dead. A fall down the stairs. The will has one condition: Maya must spend seven nights in the lake house she swore never to enter again.She arrives in fog so thick she can barely see the porch. The house is smaller than she remembers. The lake is darker. And in the attic, she finds a room that has been lived in for twenty years. The bed is still warm. The mirror is smeared with fresh lipstick. Welcome home, other one.Maya doesn't remember writing it. She doesn't remember a lot of things.The childhood friend who won't meet her eyes. The journal entries in her own handwriting describing a sister who never existed. The backpack full of rocks with her name on it. The wet footprints leading from her bed to the closet. The face in the mirror that blinks when she doesn't.Someone has been living in this house. Waiting. Watching. Leaving her clues. And the closer Maya gets to the truth, the more she realizes: the woman in the mirror isn't a stranger.She's the person Maya became so she wouldn't have to remember what she did.Her mother left more than a house. She left a locked room in the basement. A wall covered in photographs taken from a distance - Maya at her prom, Maya at graduation, Maya at work, Maya sleeping. Twenty years of watching. Twenty years of waiting for this week.The seven nights are a trap. Someone else wrote the will. Someone else has been hiding in the walls. Someone who looks exactly like Maya. Someone who says her name is Lena.But Lena died when they were thirteen. Didn't she?Maya's memories fracture. Blackouts swallow hours. She wakes in different clothes, dirt under her nails, a brass key in her pocket that opens a door she doesn't remember finding. The lake outside her window is the same lake where Lena disappeared. The same water where Maya nearly drowned. The same water that has been calling her home for twenty years.By the seventh night, she will have to choose. Which version of the past is real. Which sister survived. Which self gets to walk away from the water.And whether forgetting is the same as forgiveness.This psychological thriller peels back the layers of a fractured mind. If you cannot trust your own memory, who can you trust? And what happens when the person you have been running from is yourself?The lake knows what you did. Now it is time to remember.

Pagina's: 132, Paperback, A B Tewary Mystery Press