The Still Room

Auden Lockwood paints things she doesn't remember seeing.

Critics call it genius. Her strange, luminous canvases have made her famous almost overnight, filled with compositions that feel less imagined than remembered. Auden only knows the work comes from someplace she can't name. And after a violent attack at the end of her triumphant gallery tour, that place goes silent.

So she runs to Sawgrass Key, a speck of an island off the Georgia coast where an old house with good bones offers the chance to build a life no one else has chosen for her.

There she meets Hale Conley, an ex-military carpenter who understands why some things should be preserved rather than replaced. He doesn't try to fix Auden, doesn't ask for more than she's willing to give, and somehow makes her want to give more anyway.

Slowly, her art returns.

Then a detective arrives from the mainland with an impossible question: How did Auden paint a dead woman she never met, murdered before she was old enough to speak?

The answer lies inside everything Auden has always trusted: her art, her childhood, even her own memories. And as a decades-old murder begins to connect to bodies in the present, Auden can no longer tell whether the danger followed her to Sawgrass Key or was waiting inside her life all along.

Because someone knows where her paintings come from.

Someone has always known.