Some names were drowned so deep the world forgot they were ever spoken.
Nora Ashe finds the dead for a living - a genealogist who can read a life off a worn stone. The one tree she could never trace is her own; her family simply begins, two hundred years ago, with a man who came from nowhere. So when a great-aunt she never knew leaves her an estate in the town of Mercy, Nora goes to settle it, and finds a drained reservoir, a locked iron box with no keyhole, and a deed to a place no map admits ever existed.
Gideon Castle keeps the town's memory. The recorder's line has held Mercy's records, unbroken, since the founding - and Gideon has never once turned the old iron seal over to read what was ground into its back. He has spent his life keeping the record. He never asked what the record was keeping down.
Before there was a Mercy, there were the Marrow: forty-one souls who held the valley and named it, drowned at the founding by the man whose statue stands in the square, then erased from every page so the theft could be called a town. The water is low now. The deepest grave is bare. And the First have begun to take - not by hunting, not by haunting, but by forgetting, unmaking the living one name at a time. They have chosen the woman whose blood they share and the man whose blood erased them to do the one thing that can free them: say their names out loud, in the daylight, where a whole town can hear.
A town built on a lie. A founder's heir who would rather burn his name than keep it. And two people learning that to keep someone is not to hide them in still water - it is to remember them, to hold on, to refuse to let go.
The water is coming back. The town would rather not know. And the dead are done being no one.
Keep me.
