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🌟 It's pre-order time! 🌟 I'm incredibly excited to share this book with the world, and this post will get updated with pre-order links as they become available in preparation for the July 21, 2026 publication date. The Amazon ebook link is available here, with paperback pending which will slot onto the same listing. Bookshop and other retailers should be forthcoming shortly!

I know buying a book from an unknown author can be something of a risk, so I'm sharing the first chapter here beneath the cut; this allows you to see if you gel with my writing style and if you like the story enough to keep reading! (Always important!) Please reblog and share this if you like what you read, it would be incredibly helpful for me as an indie author. 💚 And thank you so much for considering reading my book! I hope people have a lovely, horrifying time with it.

One [Then]

I stare at the corpse and the fox’s lifeless eyes stare back, past my shoulder into the waving tassels of corn. No natural predator leaves remains like this: not so neat, so clean, or so deliberate. And I can’t seem to settle on an excuse that makes sense, so I swallow hard and whisper, “Mary-Anne.”

I’m not a child—this is hardly the first dead animal I’ve seen, and certainly not the first I’ve come across on the roads lined with flowering weeds and spindly stalks. But the animal’s fur has been split and splayed, almost peeled away from its ribs. The bones beneath gleam in the late morning sun, jarringly pale, while its beady eyes have gone dim, left to sink down into its skull.

My sister is a few paces ahead of me. She stops and turns. “We need to keep going.”

“Wait. Look.”

She moves to my side and peers over my shoulder. Then she recoils, and I can’t blame her. The dead fox stinks of spilled blood and noxious innards. The horrifying odor is knotting my already anxious belly, though no matter how hard I try, I can’t tear my gaze away.

“It’s just a dead animal,” Mary-Anne says. “Leave it alone.”

“There’s something wrong with it,” I reply.

“Of course there’s something wrong with it. It’s dead.”

That’s not what I meant, and she knows just as well. “What would do this? What sort of animal would—”

“Josie,” she says sternly, a rare emotion from her. Mary-Anne’s temperament is more prone to shy withdrawal and bouts of melancholy. “Leave it. We have to get to Eleanor’s.”

I turn my attention from the grim scene in the grass to look at the road stretched out in front of us, dusty and bumpy. She’s right, but even after I’ve looked away, I can’t push the image of the dead fox out of my mind.

Mary-Anne’s expression softens. “Please. Let’s just get there first, and then we can worry about everything else.”

“Right,” I say, though my mouth is terribly dry. The corpse remains eerily grotesque, but I was already on edge, and really, the discovery has only exacerbated my nerves. Mary-Anne’s focus has stayed exactly where it should be. With no further conversation, we set out again, an uneasy silence hanging between us. I imagine it’s got hands of its own, and fingers, and the bony digits might as well have clawed their way into our skin.

“Maybe Eleanor’s sick,” Mary-Anne offers.

“Samuel would’ve still come,” I say. “We were expecting them.”

Mary-Anne bites down on her lip, her eyes trained on the dusty road. “Maybe they’re both sick. Remember how one of the farm hands was terribly ill a few weeks ago? They could both have come down with that.”

Bless her for trying so hard to hunt down a logical explanation for why my sister and my brother-in-law failed to arrive at our farm this morning as scheduled. Living out on their own homestead now that they’re married, Eleanor and Samuel still walk the roads to our farm to help most days. Before the house sported a complete roof, the trip was usually necessary, but that’s hardly the case anymore now that Samuel’s nearly finished it: his pride and joy. He built the house for my eldest sister as a wedding present. He spent months and months assembling the walls and the roof and the tiny porch made of half-smoothed planks sitting in front of the main door, and I’ve never seen anyone pour so much adoration into a project before. He’s built them a life with his own hands, hammering in the iron nails as though each one will carry them one day further into their shared life, a beautiful sort of bridge.

That same bridge was meant to bring them back to our farm this morning. They failed to arrive on the pebble-strewn path as the sweltering sun began its overhead arc, and after a few hours, Ma grew antsy enough to send us out for answers.

“Maybe they went into town,” Mary-Anne tries.

“Into Fairview today? They knew we were expecting them.”

My sister’s pace quickens. “I don’t know, Josie. I just want to get there and discover the reason so we can laugh at how silly we were for not thinking of it.”

The summer is a hot one. The days are sticky and heavy in a way that clings to my skin and leaves behind a salty sheen beneath my chemise. My boots carry pieces of straw stuck to the soles, matted with layers of mud that never get cleaned before the next one arrives, and as we take the winding road between the fields of waving corn, the leather toes accumulate a spread of dust that obscures the dark brown finish beneath.

“Maybe…” I fill my chest with air, and then exhale as measured as possible. “Maybe one of the neighbor’s horses got loose and ended up on their farm. Maybe it injured itself, and they’re tending to it.”

“Eleanor would still come to the farm,” Mary-Anne says, her tone low like she can’t bear to pitch the argument any louder. “She knows Ma worries about every little thing.”

I wish she’d stayed quiet, for it was the best explanation I’d come up with yet. And guilt is curling in my belly. I can’t claim that I haven’t been jealous of Eleanor, being able to move off the farm and into her own homestead. Nothing ever seemed to push the tendrils of envy aside, and I’ve never dared speak of it to Mary-Anne. She’s closer than I am to having the same opportunity, considering her nineteenth birthday sits a few months out while I just counted my seventeenth.

Now, I’m terrified that somehow, my selfish jealousy of Eleanor’s bright future has taken on a life of its own and invited misfortune.

“Samuel could have broken his leg,” I try, rather desperately. “He couldn’t have walked the roads with a broken leg.”

“And Eleanor could be tending to him,” Mary-Anne says.

“He could have been trying to get some pieces done on the barn!” I say. “Falling from those rafters would certainly have broken something.”

Mary-Anne’s face brightens slightly. “And didn’t he mention just last week how eager they were to complete it! Josie, that must be it. He must have slipped on the beams, and either he hurt his leg or he rattled his head; either way, Eleanor wouldn’t leave him alone.”

Despite how exhaustion has been licking at the back of my thoughts since I woke before the dawn—little Michael was inconsolable this morning, and I’m a poor substitute for Ma—having such a logical excuse laid before us cheers me slightly. My shoulders shed a bit of their tightness, my muscles unwinding just enough to offer some relief.

Still, even with the reasonable explanation, the air against my ears seems to whisper threateningly, and nothing quells the dread pooling in my stomach.

“That must be it,” I say, ignoring the prickles along my arms.

“Eleanor would never leave him alone with such an injury!” Mary-Anne adds, still clinging to this hope we’ve knit between us. “Remember that time when you were five, and you forgot to close the coop doors overnight, and we woke up to find three of the chickens torn to pieces?”

“Eleanor spent the whole morning out there picking up the feathers so I wouldn’t see them when I went outside and get upset all over again.”

Mary-Anne nods, and I suspect it’s more for herself than me. “That’s just how she is. She’d stay by his bedside all day, even if he was hollering at her to find something else to keep her busy.”

The road winds around a small clump of trees heavy with green; at this point in the summer, almost everything is green, even the fields we pass by on our journey. In the fall, the corn stalks will brown and wither, but now they’re blindingly bright as they wave their tassels in the breeze. We avoid the patch of yellow parsnip blossoms that have sprung up near the roadside as to avoid the resulting burns on our skin. Soon, the flowers will fall, and the oils will follow suit, taking the threat of rash with them. By the time we reach the last bend in the road, my skin carries a layer of sweat and salt, and the loose strands of my hair that have escaped the braids are plastered to the side of my face.

Eleanor and Samuel live at the end of a dirt road, protected by a line of half-grown coniferous trees that’ll eventually provide them with wind cover. Behind the house spread their fields, with my sister’s burgeoning garden tucked into the back corner of the wild grass plot and their water well beyond that, a circle of rocks. It’s a beautiful homestead. I’m wretched to covet her new life like I do.

But as we start for the front stoop, which requires quite a lunge to get up without the still forthcoming concrete foundation, the hairs on my arms stand on end. Something is strange about the air surrounding the house. The insects and birds that had kept us company for most of our walk have fled, taking their songs and trills with them; now, it’s only the two of us, standing in front of the too-quiet house. Neither my sister nor her new husband are in sight, and the front door is ajar, cracked open and swung into the entryway. Even if something had happened to keep them here instead of at our farm, there ought to be a sign of them somewhere.

Why would the door be open?

“Mary-Anne,” I breathe. Apprehension has locked my knees, and trying to move my legs nearly knocks me over.

Mary-Anne is silent for several moments when the only audible sound is our ragged breathing. Then she straightens. “They must be inside.”

“Why can’t we hear them?”

But Mary-Anne’s attention is elsewhere. She’s looking out past the barn, still in pieces and half-constructed—a skeleton exposed to the elements without anything to protect the bones. “I thought I saw something.”

I’ve seen nothing, and that in itself rings wrong. Out here, the birds nest in every rough-barked tree while critters manage to find every crevice available between the house foundation, the barn shadows, and the rows within the fields. I don’t want to focus on it, because I know if I do, everything will crystalize further. “What?”

“I don’t know.” She sucks in a ragged breath. “Josie, where are they?”

“They must be in the house. If they’re sick, or if something happened, they’d be in the house.” My stomach twists. I’m dizzy.

Mary-Anne doesn’t respond. She walks to the front door, leaving me no choice but to follow her. She moves sluggishly, dreamlike, to the stoop and takes the high step, and then whatever courage motivated her forward in the first place seems to disappear. She pauses within the wooden beams of the doorframe, glancing back at me over her shoulder, and oh, my legs don’t want to carry me up to that doorway. I fight against the urge to turn and run, because this is Eleanor. This is my sister who sat by my side for the weeks I was near death with scarlet fever, thrashing beneath the quilt. This is my sister who lovingly brushed my hair every morning when I was young, humming hymns while her fingers corded through the strands. Whatever wrongness has slid around me like a snakeskin, I owe it to Eleanor to see what’s going on inside.

Mary-Anne is shaking when I push past her, my shoes scraping along the wood floors. As soon as I’m inside the walls, a buzz fills my ears. All the insects we’d been missing seem to have congested within the large room Samuel built from the ground up. The flies are everywhere. I take one step forward and have to swat at them with my hand because they hit the sides of my face.

When I was younger, we’d had a barn cat disappear for a few days. Normally, we don’t pay much attention to the mousers, since they come and go whenever they want, but this one had been around for a year or so, and his sudden absence was noticeable. I’d finally discovered the cat’s body a week later in the timber near our homestead, following the sound of the black fly swarm and the pungent scent of decay. It’s the sort of smell that’s never left my memories, no matter how many years have passed.

It’s here, in the house, wrapping around my shoulders.

I know exactly what I’m going to find as I force my feet forward, limbs jerky and joints stiff.

Samuel is the one I spy first. His body is lying by the far wall, crumpled on his side. Blood has spread out beneath him in an uneven sort of oval, the liquid having hit the cracks in the wood floor and then diverted its course. He isn’t moving. Behind me, Mary-Anne makes a noise somewhere between a moan and a sob, the air catching in her throat and sort of mutating, but I can’t seem to get anything out of my lungs. I can’t even breathe as I keep walking. I no longer have control over my body; I’m floating above it, watching the scene unfold, and no matter how much I yell at myself, the end is inescapable.

Where is my sister?

I have to find Eleanor: she could be hiding, or she could be injured, and I have to find her.

It doesn’t take long, for the first floor of the house isn’t that large with only the two front rooms and the kitchen stretched out from the back. My boots creak across Samuel’s beautiful floor until I reach the kitchen, near the wall of the stairwell, because the flies are congregating in one spot. They crawl over my sister’s outstretched hand and across her cheek, flying around her ear facing up towards the ceiling and her mouth, parted, like her final words died on her tongue when she did. It looks as though she dragged herself across the floor somehow, for there’s a smear of red behind her. The terrible color is darker in the middle, appearing thick, as though it’s congealed. It probably has.

Eleanor’s glassy, unseeing eye stares at nothing as the flies swarm around her head.

Mary-Anne starts to scream.

And even though the shriek curdles my veins, I can’t match her. All I can do is stare and stare and stare at my sister’s face, her unmoving form, because she’s so very obviously, horribly dead. There’s so much blood. Her dress is soaked with it, dyed a vivid crimson; it’s darker at her chest, nearly black upon the fabric. I think back to the fox with its fur peeled away from its ribs—for that’s how my sister died, with her lifeforce fleeing her body all at once. And just like that fox, she spent her last moments staring up at whatever tore her skin apart.

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