"Grief is the price we pay for love."
Seventeen-year-old Andy didn't think he could lose anything else. After discovering his father dead on the bathroom floor, he and his blind twelve-year-old sister Piper are placed in the care of Laura Marlowe, a seemingly warm, eccentric foster mother living in a secluded Victorian house. A safe haven, at last.
But the house hides secrets.
There's the drained swimming pool, choked with dead leaves. The locked basement door. And Oliver, a mute, deeply unsettling boy who watches Piper with an intensity that makes Andy's skin crawl.
Then Andy finds the photographs. A blind girl, no older than Piper. Dressed in the exact same white dress Laura had laid out for his sister.
Now Andy is in a race against time to uncover the truth: Laura is consumed by an agonizing grief over her own daughter, Cathy, who drowned years ago. She has summoned a demonic entity called Tari using an occult ritual from a Russian VHS tape-and she believes Piper is the perfect vessel to bring Cathy back.
The ritual demands a sacrifice: a body killed in the exact same manner as the original.
Laura plans to drown Piper in the pool during a rainstorm.
With the help of their social worker, Andy fights to expose Laura's madness-but the entity inside Oliver is growing restless, violent, and hungry. As the storm descends and the ritual approaches, Andy must make an impossible choice: save his sister, or become part of Laura's desperate resurrection.
Because grief can make monsters of us all.
And some mothers will do anything to bring their children back.
A haunting psychological horror novel exploring the dark side of grief, the bonds of family, and the terrifying lengths love will go to when it refuses to let go.