They said Wiley Owens ran. Mae never believed them.
In 1974, Mae Clementine Owens is twenty-eight years old and still living on the western North Carolina land her family has held for generations. She grows what she can, gathers the herbs her grandmother taught her to use, and makes illegal whiskey to pay the taxes and buy what the mountain will not give.
Blackwing has never known what to do with a woman like Mae. She quit church years ago, lives alone, and answers to no one. The same people who judge her still come quietly to her door for remedies, and buy her whiskey when no one is looking.
Then Mercer Garrett is found dead at an abandoned still site on Owens land. In his pocket is an old Zippo engraved with Wiley Owens’s initials, the same lighter Mae’s father carried when he disappeared eleven years before. Its return cracks open the story Blackwing has lived by for more than a decade: that Wiley ran, that the Garretts and Owenses were born enemies, that land records tell the truth just because the courthouse keeps them.
As Mae digs into old deeds, hidden ledgers, family lies, and the secrets her grandmother carried to the grave, she begins to understand that her father’s disappearance was never only about one missing man. It was about stolen land, buried loyalty, and the dangerous things people will do to protect the story that lets them sleep at night.
Mae has spent half her life trying to prove her father didn't abandon her. Now she may have to decide what the truth is worth.
