What the Water Hid

About the book

Wren Kesler is a hospice nurse with thirty-one dollars in the bank, an eviction behind her, and a complaint open with the nursing board. So when a placement agency she never registered with offers her a live-in job four miles down a private road, cash on Fridays, she says yes before they finish the sentence about the road.

She tells herself it's the money. It isn't.

Her patient is Ellis Vane, seventy-one, dying in a glassed-in sunroom above a New Hampshire lake. His daughter runs the house, the money, and the morphine count. The housekeeper has a dementia diagnosis, a cookie tin she won't set down, and a story about a sink full of cold water that she has been telling for twenty-two years. The first time she sees Wren, she says, "You came back, then, little bird."

Everyone in town knows the story. Ellis's wife drowned off the end of that dock in 2003, and the town decided long ago who did it.

Wren has been keeping notes on this house for a very long time. And she knows what every hospice nurse knows: at three in the morning, with the pump turned down, the dying say things they have never said to anyone. All she has to do is decide how long to hold the next dose.

Told in the clipped, counting voice of a woman who charts everything and says nothing, What the Water Hid is a slow-burn psychological suspense novel about who gets believed, what money buys, and what one woman is willing to do with the truth once she finally has it.

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