Everything Left in Ash

Five years ago, wildfire took Wren Calloway's sister on a hillside the official report called unpredictable. Wren built an entire career on the conviction that fire tells the truth even when the people investigating it don't — and that somewhere in her sister's case file is a truth nobody has looked hard enough to find.

When a fatality fire breaks out in Emberfall County, Wren is called to the scene. So is Cinderwatch — the private arson-investigation outfit that rejected her four years ago, run by former hotshot superintendent Beckett Marchetti. She expects to be shut out again. Instead, his lead investigator says two words that undo five years of careful grief: *methods repeat.*

The pattern connecting this new fire to the one that killed her sister pulls Wren into an uneasy partnership with the one man equipped to actually help her prove it — and into Cinderwatch's most dangerous case yet. Buried in land records is a name tied to a fortune built on ground nobody was ever supposed to survey too closely, and someone patient enough to have spent years making sure it stayed buried.

Wren has always trusted char over people. She's about to learn that Beckett Marchetti might be the first person in five years worth trusting with more than just a case file — right as the fire she's chasing turns to make sure she never gets the chance.

EVERYTHING LEFT IN ASH is Book One of the Cinderwatch series: a slow-burn, rivals-to-lovers romantic suspense about grief, justice, and the fires we set to survive what we can't outrun.