The Terms of Surrender

Ada Sokolov, thirty-two, drives north from Boston to Marble Cove the morning her grandmother is buried. She has not been back in twelve years. The town is the same. The cottage is the same. The debt her grandmother left her is not. The cottage knows her name, the way it has known her family since 1692, and it has been waiting. Pinnacle Industries wants seven figures in ninety days. Behind a loose plank in the floorboards, Ada finds a tin box of 1989 pollution records — and, tucked between the sheets, a single page in her grandmother's hand that reads the cottage remembers the line. Ada has not learned what that means. She will. Lucas Marsh, the architect whose grandfather once betrayed the Sokolovs, watches her from the driftwood coffee counter. Julian Voss, whose family has kept the town's older histories since before the trials at Salem, climbs her leaking roof and laughs in a voice she will learn is steadier than she thinks. Theo Mercer, the prosecutor whose father once buried the truth, sits across from her and says the case can win, if she is willing to pay what it costs. Ada has ninety days. She has a cottage that knows her name. The terms of surrender, it turns out, are older than any of them. Read the free preview chapters on SweetNovel.