Fractured Reflections

He teaches English. He walks past the lake every day. He has no memory of what he does at night.

Evan Marshall came back to Lakeview - the small town where his older brother drowned twenty years ago. Five boys were on the dock that day. The police called it an accident. The file was three pages long. The case was closed in forty-eight hours.

Evan doesn't talk about it. He teaches. He keeps his apartment clean, his routine precise, his life small enough to control. He is, by every visible measure, a man who has moved on.

Then three of those boys turn up dead in an abandoned barn. Face-down. Arms spread. Stones placed in their hands. The posture of the drowned.

Detective Tom Connors recognises the names - and the twenty-year-old case note in his own handwriting that he never followed up on. As he digs into the cold case, every thread leads back to the quiet teacher with the watchful eyes - a man whose apartment is cleaned by hands he doesn't remember using, whose notebook is filling with handwriting that looks like his but isn't, and whose dead brother's voice is getting louder.

Something inside Evan Marshall has been waiting for twenty years.

It's finished waiting.

Fractured Reflections is Book One of the Fractured series.