Ring Around The Rosy

By Brian E. Niskala

1348. The plague has come to Avignon, and it does not ask who deserves to live.
Dr. Elias Rothchild has spent months watching his own careful science fail against a sickness that shows no pattern he can find - until the morning he discovers the telltale mark on his own wife's neck, hidden beneath her collar, already there before she says a single word.
He sends her away to safety. He does not tell her what he saw.
Jessica knows already. She has known since before she left the city gates - and in her final days, she asks her sister Patricia for something no honest woman should ever be asked to give: to become her, in ink and paper, for as long as it takes a grieving husband to hold onto the will to keep working. One voice. One name. One year of letters written in a dead woman's hand.
What begins as mercy becomes something neither sister ever intended. Patricia's own words, dressed in her sister's name, slip further from imitation and closer to truth with every letter she sends - and three hundred miles away, a widower who has already lost everything once finds himself falling in love with a woman he believes he already lost.
When the plague finally loosens its grip on Avignon, the truth can wait no longer. Elias must decide whether the love he built on a year of paper and ink was ever anything less than real - and whether the woman standing in his doorway, at long last telling him everything, is asking for forgiveness, or simply asking to finally be seen.
Ring Around the Rosy is a story of grief, deception, and the particular kind of honesty that only becomes possible once every easier lie has already been told - a novel about what people build, together, out of the very worst a single year can ask them to bear.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HHQRXRLF
• ISBN13: 9798171812683
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 142 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"