THE TWENTY-NINTH

Her name is already in the book, in her own handwriting, and she did not write it.

Anne Ahearn takes the night desk at the Pelham Annex to be someone useful and unremarkable. She has spent eleven years at an emergency desk asking strangers, Who can we call? and writing none on every form that asks her. On her eighth night she finds a green cloth ledger open on the sorting table. Fifth: Anne Ahearn. Beside it, a date that exists only once every four years: the twenty-ninth of February.

The Annex keeps a register of the unclaimed dead. It also, quietly and on the leap day, takes one living name, the one with no one behind it. The director calls it the least harm. A shy, loud, nineteen-year-old archivist who reads everything aloud calls it a list of people. A coastal surveyor, Tomás Quispe-Reyes, who measures a drowning cemetery for a living and has not said his brother's name in four years, calls it the reason he did not sleep.

As the tide takes the low ground and the board prepares to ship every record out of the building, Anne has ten weeks, one sister she cannot bring herself to forgive or to ask for, and a ledger that moves toward her whenever she tries to put it down. The only way to break it is to do the one thing she has never done: say a name out loud, and ask someone to stay.

A dark, atmospheric coastal mystery with a restrained slow-burn romance, a reckoning between sisters, and a bargain that spreads a debt instead of paying it.

Book Two of The Station Nine Ledger. A stand-alone story with a satisfying ending.

Read it with the rain on and one lamp lit.