"Monsters are real, ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win"- Stephen King

Fleeing the ghosts of a painful past, a woman seeks refuge on a remote Maine island, settling into a weathered 1840s farmhouse with her two faithful dogs and one elderly cat. The house is old, holding echoes of lives long passed, and one night, during winter solstice, a spectral visitor—a former resident—arrives with a quiet kindness. Or so it seems.

Through their late-night conversations in the deep hush of winter, a story unfolds.

Seeking solitude to finish her latest novel, a writer of historical romances rents a remote cabin high on a Colorado mountainside. But the quiet she longs for gives way to whispers of older stories—of vanished women, watching forests, and a ghost whose longing feels perilously human. Drawn into a convergence of folklore, faith, and radical devotion to the earth, she begins to question the boundaries between myth and reality, love and possession, nature and the divine.

When she learns she may be fated to bear the savior of a planet in decline, her understanding of what it means to be human—and what the earth demands in return—is forever altered.

Blending the unease of The Changeling with the haunting allure of The Drowning Kind, this novel reveals a world both familiar and strange, where salvation may be indistinguishable from surrender.