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Returning to settle her mother's estate, archivist Mara Cole finds her sister missing from every photograph and municipal ledger. In fogbound Evershade an ancient Ledger devours names and a secret Keepers' order defends oblivion. To restore memory, someone must willingly vanish.
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When Mara Cole drove over the ridge into Evershade, the town sat in the late light like a bruise, small and stubborn against a sky that seemed to hold its breath. She had thought about not returning; each mile collected a different argument. But the probate notice in her hand smelled of legal finality and the envelope from the town hall had the neat, typed urgency of something that would not be patient. Evershade had been small enough that she had once believed she could leave it like a dusting and come back clean.
The mill road still smelled of wet fiber and old machinery. Wooden boards sighed under her rental's tires. She had not been back since the service, since the flowers had wilted and the casket had been lowered; everything after had been other people's boxes and signatures.
Evershade's records sat in a low brick building by the river, a place where sunlight came in slow and the town's memory was stacked in filing cabinets and jars of mildew. Her mother had been an archivist in a house of crooked indexes; she had trained Mara to make lists of lists. The family album was in the box labeled M. Cole — personal papers, she said when she handed Mara the key — and Mara flipped it with professional reverence.
Photographs folded like moth wings under years of breath; the smell of old glue rose like a second memory. There were June's pictures — a girl with a bob of hair and a gap-toothed grin, June at the creek, June by the painted fence — and then the blank. Between two photographs was a pale rectangle where someone had torn a page clean; the album's adhesive had left a ghost of image, a smear of color that made Mara's throat close.
She expected—she needed—the blank to be an absence she could catalog: a lost photograph, misfiled. Instead, the empty space felt deliberate, as if someone had smoothed the surface of a memory until nothing could catch. She turned the page and found municipal forms with neat typed entries; under the column labeled 'dependents' a small line had been struck out, the ink leeched almost to white.