The Reservoir Between Us
Cornwall, Ontario is running dry, and the lake is finally giving up what it swallowed sixty-seven years ago.
Hydrologist Mara Venn has spent her career trusting that evidence speaks for itself. Then a record-low water level exposes the drowned road of Aultsville - the village her own family never talks about - and a rusted bell bracket bearing a name from her grandmother's hidden past. What Mara finds beneath the surface doesn't just threaten to expose a decades-old betrayal. It threatens to expose the quiet formula currently deciding who in her city gets water and who goes without.
Jonah Vale built that formula. As director of the region's Water Commons Assembly, he's spent three years believing that careful process is the only thing standing between Cornwall and outright collapse - three years since he chose that same careful process over the woman he once promised his whole life to. Now Mara is back, asking the one question his family has spent sixty years making sure nobody asks: what does "neutral" actually cost, and who's been paying it?
As the drought tightens and an old promise resurfaces - one written the year before Aultsville disappeared, guaranteeing something the region conveniently forgot - Mara and Jonah are forced to choose, together and separately, between the safety of silence and the harder, costlier work of the truth. A charter is coming. A gate may have to open. And somewhere beneath it all, a bell that shouldn't still be ringing keeps calling them both back to the water.
The Reservoir Between Us is a novel about what a region owes the people it displaced, what two people owe each other, and whether love can survive being honest for the first time.
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