Wait for Me
They drowned a town to build a lake. They never told the children they weren't coming back.
Sixty years later, the water is going down.
Cora Ashby comes to Mercy with one suitcase and a photograph of the great-grandmother her family would never speak about: a young teacher on the steps of a schoolhouse, her hand on the shoulder of the smallest of seventeen children. Cora wants one answer. Was Della Ashby a woman who did something terrible, or a woman a terrible thing was done to? The lake is the only thing that knows, and the lake is being drained.
As the reservoir drops, the drowned schoolhouse rises into the air for the first time in sixty years, and the town that buried the truth begins to come apart. A man drowns sitting up, dry, behind a locked door. Children no one can see hum a counting song at the waterline. And out across the flats, a small bell rings to call a class in. They are not angry. They only want to be counted, to be told the truth, and to be let out. And they have decided that Cora, who wears their teacher's face, is the one who will finally come back for them.
Asa Pruett is the golden heir of the family that opened the gates a day early. He should be the last person Cora trusts. He is also the next name on a sixty-year-old roll, and the only one in Mercy willing to burn his own name down to help her end it. To free seventeen children who have waited in the dark since 1961, Cora will have to walk into the flooding school on the worst day, stand where her great-grandmother could not, and choose what she is willing to pay.
Some debts don't get settled at the dam. They get settled at the school.
Wait for Me is the second book in the Drowning Mercy series and can be read on its own: a gothic slasher romance with an enemies-to-lovers slow burn, a small town with a terrible secret, and a love story told in the cold space between a ringing bell and an answer.
Content note: drowning and peril, the deaths of children (in the past), supernatural dread, grief, and scenes of intimacy.
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