Elizabeth Goodweather knows what it's like to be an outsider, to keep secrets and nurse wounds. But Elizabeth raised a family in these mist-shrouded North Carolina hills and is deeply settled on her small farm—even finding the space to let a new man into her life. Everything changes when her daughter Rosemary returns home, determined to solve a nineteen-year-old riddle: the mysterious disappearance of her best friend, Maythorn Mullins, when the girls were just ten.<br><br>Soon Elizabeth and her daughter are prying into the strange history of the Mullins family, confronting a complex thicket of relationships and exploring a realm of magic and Cherokee legend that Maythorn shared secretly with Rosemary. <br><br>But most of all, they will discover that behind a child's disappearance was something more evil and far closer than they ever imagined....