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An archivist returns to Hollowbridge with a municipal volume that seems to excise people from memory. As she uncovers signatures, sealed packets and a penciled date that names a friend, she must choose whether to expose the town's practice. The town's quiet life tilts toward reckoning as evidence, a sister's return, and a public meeting force a fragile unravelling.
The lane that led into Hollowbridge had always felt like an argument: a narrow, stubborn thing that would not yield to growth, hemmed in by hedgerows and small walls of fieldstone. As the rental car eased past the pond where the willows still dipped their toes, Elise watched the town come back to her in pieces—tile roofs like the ribs of a sleeping animal, a church spire faint against a low winter sky, the battered sign of the bakery that had kept the same two pinprick lights for as long as she could remember. She had left with an address and a degree, with a clerk’s habit and a refusal to go back. She had returned with a cardboard box labeled in her grandmother’s exact hand, and a grief that sat in her throat like a stone.
Her grandmother’s house smelled of boiled tea and old paper. The living room was exactly as Elise remembered it: a mismatched armchair draped in a crocheted throw, a clock whose pendulum lost time and made itself quiet, and at the far edge of the room a high shelf crouched with labeled boxes. Elise moved through the rooms with the practiced gentleness of someone who had catalogued other people’s belongings for a living but who had never catalogued her own home. The corners held small lives: a pair of scuffed boots, a red scarf wrapped and tied like a quiet promise, a tin of buttons. She found the funeral notices folded in the bottom drawer of a writing desk and the small card with the minister’s name tucked within a book of hymns.
It was the attic smells that made her fingers clumsy—the dry, warm dust, a perfume of lavender and cedar eluding between trunks. A crate had been slid beneath a tarpaulin; inside, wrapped in a moth-scarred tea towel, lay a bound volume the color of old paper and rain. It was larger than she expected, heavy as if carrying gravity, and without a title on the spine. The cover was scarred by years of thumbed use; margins bloomed with annotations in different hands, and a slender ribbon, the color of pewter, had been laid like a bookmark near the front. Elise set the lid across her knees and let the sun from the small attic window fall on the pages as she opened it.