A spoken name may save you from becoming lost…

But what will it take from the one who voiced it?

Alicia Roberts has built her life on stability: a thriving psychiatry practice, a house in the quiet Appalachian woods, and routines precise enough to hold loneliness at bay. She knows what it means to lose: friends to distance, her mother to death, and her first love to choices she refuses to revisit.

One winter evening, waiting for a date she knows will never arrive, a hand reaches for her plate. She slaps it away without thinking, then freezes. Standing before her is Will, the boy she once loved, a ghost she believed was long gone. When she speaks his name aloud, the world itself seems to shudder.

But something isn’t right. No one else sees him. His actions vanish into coincidence, his very existence erased from memory. Everyone forgets him, everyone but Alicia. And as she anchors him back into reality, she begins to feel the cost tightening around her own life.

Now Alicia must decide how much of herself she will give to keep him from vanishing again. Because memory isn’t always a gift. Sometimes it is a wound that refuses to close.

Will’s escape from Fate has left him cursed, and the Fyrues—the rotted echoes of divine vengeance—are not the only corrupted beings closing in. Something older and colder has taken notice, quietly tallying every stolen breath in its threefold ledger.

And—worst of all—that ledger must be balanced.