Between the Veil

Mara Calloway has spent her career cataloguing other people's lives - the weight of their objects, the stories their rooms hold. She's good at it. What she hasn't been good at is her own.

At forty-four, eight months out of a quiet divorce and not entirely sure who she is without the marriage, she drives north to a small Maine fishing village to settle her great-aunt's estate. One week, she tells herself. Just the house.

But Thornwick has been waiting for her. The village knows her name before she gives it. The house on Veil Lane is warm before she touches the thermostat. And the journals her great-aunt left behind - addressed to Mara, in handwriting she's known since childhood - seem to know things they shouldn't.

Things like what she needs. And when she'll be ready to receive it.

Between the Veil is a story about grief that has been living in the wrong room. About a woman who has spent a lifetime being sixty percent of herself. About a village that has been holding something in trust for three hundred years, a man quietly building a chair he doesn't yet understand, and a line of women across the centuries who saw what others couldn't - and did the work anyway. Stay as long as you need, the journals say. Stay longer than you think you need.

That is, in my experience, always exactly the right amount of time.