Fiction

Three girls grow up together in Wheeling, West Virginia, around the time of the Civil War: one impoverished and ambitious, one haunted by spirits that reveal what the living try to hide, and one enslaved, her freedom contingent on the death of the very person she's been ordered to keep alive. Their lives are tangled around one man—brother to one, husband to another, and predator of the third—who tries to cheat them out of what is theirs. When the system is designed to break you, what does it cost to fight back—and what does it cost not to?