"Grief is the price we pay for love."
Seventeen-year-old Andy didn't think he could lose anything else. After discovering his father dead on the bathroom floor, he and his blind twelve-year-old sister Piper are placed in the care of Laura Marlowe, a seemingly warm, eccentric foster mother living in a secluded Victorian house. A safe haven, at last.
But the house hides secrets.
There's the drained swimming pool, choked with dead leaves. The locked basement door. And Oliver, a mute, deeply unsettling boy who watches Piper with an intensity that makes Andy's skin crawl.
Then Andy finds the photographs. A blind girl, no older than Piper. Dressed in the exact same white dress Laura had laid out for his sister.
Now Andy is in a race against time to uncover the truth: Laura is consumed by an agonizing grief over her own daughter, Cathy, who drowned years ago. She has summoned a demonic entity called Tari using an occult ritual from a Russian VHS tape—and she believes Piper is the perfect vessel to bring Cathy back.
The ritual demands a sacrifice: a body killed in the exact same manner as the original.
Laura plans to drown Piper in the pool during a rainstorm.
With the help of their social worker, Andy fights to expose Laura's madness—but the entity inside Oliver is growing restless, violent, and hungry. As the storm descends and the ritual approaches, Andy must make an impossible choice: save his sister, or become part of Laura's desperate resurrection.
Because grief can make monsters of us all.
And some mothers will do anything to bring their children back.
A haunting psychological horror novel exploring the dark side of grief, the bonds of family, and the terrifying lengths love will go to when it refuses to let go.
