The Carried

In Halvard, Minnesota, nobody has to suffer. Somebody else does it for them.

For fifty-nine years, the people of a dying Iron Range mining town have kept a quiet custom. When grief or illness or shame gets too heavy to bear, they write it down, sign their name, and send it up the hill to the abandoned sanatorium. By morning the pain is gone.

But it doesn't disappear. It runs downhill.

ER nurse Nora Hesketh comes home in the winter of 1997 to bury her mother. Her mother died of pancreatic cancer and, everyone says, never felt a thing. Nora knows that's impossible. Then she meets Toby Lind, the twelve-year-old foster kid who delivered her mother's newspaper. He has bruises nobody gave him, pain that isn't his, and a notebook titled Things That Are Not Mine.

The plant is closing. A historic blizzard is coming. Every frightened soul in Halvard is about to send at once, and something on the hill is hungry for a boy who can carry it all.

To save him, Nora will have to give a whole town back everything it ever gave away.

Every hurt to its own hand.