Where the Dead Still Love
In the fog-bound town of Ashly Hills, unfinished love doesn’t just haunt — it lingers as a Remnant, tethered to the living until a Binder can release it. Rose Calloway has spent her life performing these releases, paying each one in fragments of her own memory, ever since she freed her mother from a decade-long vigil for a husband who never came home.
When a string of impossible deaths sweeps through town — victims with no wound but a face frozen in terror — Rose discovers something worse than a Remnant gone wrong: a Hollow-thing, an ancient hunger that’s learned to wear unfinished grief like a disguise and feed on everyone who still carries it. Her investigation pulls her toward Jessie Marlowe, a guarded man newly returned to Ashly Hills, whose dead fiancée’s unbound tether may be the very door the creature is using.
As the killings escalate and the Hollow-thing grows strong enough to manufacture new grief instead of feeding on old wounds, Rose is forced to confront the one debt she’s never let herself name — and learns that the only thing hungrier than a monster born of unfinished love is love that’s finally allowed to be spoken.
A horror-fantasy mystery about grief, memory, and what it costs to let go.