The girl at Silver Thistle

In a village where the thistles grow silver in the autumn mist and the old ways still hold sway, a girl arrives whose name no one can pronounce and whose history no one dares to ask about. She takes a room above the pub at Silver Thistle, and from her window she watches the locals pretend not to watch her. There's something in the way she moves through the lanes, the way she goes silent when the conversation turns to the accident at the lake, the way her hands know things they shouldn't know. The villagers have their secrets too: the farmer who visits the ruins after dark, the widow who still sets an extra place at dinner, the children who play a game none of the adults will discuss. As autumn deepens and the first frosts come, the girl begins to understand that she didn't come to Silver Thistle by accident. And the village is starting to wish she'd never come at all. A quietly unsettling debut about what we carry with us, what we leave behind, and the price of belonging to a place that doesn't want to be known.