Haven Powers has spent years trying to disappear. Once a loud, troublemaking girl who defied every expectation in her small town of Friendship, Texas, now she’s learned to hide her fire behind a quiet receptionist’s smile. It’s safer that way—for her, and for everyone else.
When an unsettling encounter with her predatory boss cracks open the tightly locked box inside her, Haven dreams a terrifying dream about him, only to wake up and discover it’s come true; he’s dead. Desperate to gain control of this deadly power once and for all, Haven returns home.
Welcomed suspiciously with open arms, Haven is immediately met with the ghosts of her past. Under the suffocating pressure of the town and her family who believe obedience is next to godliness, Haven soon finds herself on a path to revenge. She’ll show them what happens when the girl they called too much, too loud, too everything, finally lets her demons loose.
Release date:
October 13, 2026
Publisher:
Berkley
Print pages:
368
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The walls, once painted ecru or eggshell or some wispy-sounding off-white, have soured to a color that more closely resembles curdled milk. My beige button-down and mousy brown hair almost camouflage me from my coworkers Cindy and Sienna, who are enjoying their lunch at the table in the center of the room. I've slid against the wall, let my shoulder blades dig into the plaster in order to avoid small talk. I've done so every day since I started working at Second City Title and Trust over a year ago.
I don't blame them for ignoring me.
My invisibility is by design.
"Roger is such a tool!" Cindy says, her exclamation hopping over the gray linoleum tiles toward me unbidden. She's got one of those chipper, bright voices that usually accompanies sorority girls or cheer captains in movies. Her chestnut-brown hair is cut in a long bob that hits her collarbone with precise straight-edge ends. Not a split in sight.
"You don't mean it." Sienna dips her spoon into her low-fat yogurt and removes it coated. She doesn't take bites; she nibbles and licks and samples.
Elmdale, Illinois, is a suburb of Chicago with a prestigious school system and lots of new money. Second City Title and Trust handles real estate closings for most of the town. We straddle two counties, which puts us in high demand. Sienna and Cindy work in Escrow as assistants. They're starting to do their own closings-their bloodlust reeks. Sienna has a background in real estate, so even though she's been here less than a year, the contacts she brought in with her have ensured a quick rise through the ranks. Cindy on the other hand works hard, stays late, hustles. I can give her credit for that much at least.
"I mean it," Cindy says, with breathy adamancy. "I brought in that contract on Fairfax-1.3 mil. Roger acted like he was doing me a favor letting me clean the title before he handled the closing."
Roger is the lead escrow officer and manager. I work as his assistant, as well as the receptionist for the whole goddamn office. Roger has never offered me a raise, and there's been no discussion of me taking my assistant/receptionist duties to the next level. Not that I want either of those things, not when I know it would require I give more of myself to this job, this place, this life.
I don't have more of myself to give. But Cindy is right.
Roger is a tool. This fact is not negated by my appreciation that he seems to see me mostly as shrubbery, just how I like it. And since Roger has an office full of underlings to work his files, he spends a considerable amount of time with his racket and calls it networking. We rarely have to deal with him for a full eight-hour workday.
Cindy needs to take her blessings when they come.
"At least that's all he had you clean," Sienna says, using her spoon to mimic a certain phallic activity. Cindy's face tightens-subtle enough that I'd miss it if I wasn't paying attention.
I let out the smallest sound. A groan lodged in my throat like a chip swallowed wrong.
Cindy whips her head around, brown eyes searing. "What's that, Haven?" she asks.
Fuck. Invisibility breached.
"I didn't say anything," I reply, crunching the wrapper of my Kind bar in my hand.
"You laughed," Sienna chimes in. She sets her yogurt container down on the table. Spoon erect.
"I had a tickle in my throat," I say, instinctively clearing it to demonstrate her error.
I blend into the walls. I avoid conversation. I deflect conflict. It's all on purpose.
"Oh my God, is it Covid?" Sienna questions, lifting her hand in a shoo motion.
"Allergies," I reply.
"That's what people say when they have Covid." Sienna yanks up her yogurt and moves toward the exit. "I have a date this weekend, can't get sick-"
I'm rooted, shoulders glued to the wall, as I watch her go.
"Don't worry about Roger, Cindy," Sienna says as she moves. "You know he's mostly just a blowhard." She doesn't see the callback; I pinch my nose to hold in a snort, and she's gone.
Cindy still watches me. My eyes shift to hers and then divert to the fridge. There's a closing in half an hour, and Roger likes me to have cookies baking when clients arrive. Something about how "studies" show the smell can trigger strong positive emotions, a factor Roger considers tantamount to keeping Second City at the top.
I throw my Kind bar wrapper away and cross the room to the fridge, then yank open the freezer door to reveal a nearly empty cavern. I need to order more cookies and I keep forgetting. Peanut butter. Shit! That's all we have left.
Cindy is up, at my side. She smells like citrus and green, sharp and earthy but sweet.
"You're not gonna tell Roger, are you?" Her eyes clamp onto my profile. She's willing me to look at her. She knows she's pretty, and pretty gets you far.
I flick my eyes over, my hand momentarily paused in motion toward the peanut butter balls. "I was just letting off steam."
Our eyes connect. There's a storm of gold that swirls in the deep brown. "You know how it is." She touches my forearm.
I jerk away. She steps back.
It's an overreaction to what can only be described as friendly camaraderie. I know it, she knows it, and it's about to get weird if I don't say something.
"I know how it is," I reply. The freezer hangs open, cold chilling the air between us. "I need to make the cookies for Roger's two thirty."
She gives me a weak smile, underscored with how uncomfortable I'm making her, but she nods and exhales a tiny puff of air through her small pink pouty lips. Relief, that we're on the same page. At least that's what she thinks just happened.
"Of course," she says. She takes another step back and grabs the bento box holding the remnants of her lunch. "People come from miles away to close here for the cookies alone."
We both know that's bullshit. But it's a good exit line, and at least she uses it right. She's gone and I'm by myself again, just as I like it.
The smell of peanut butter cookies fills the air. Salty and sweet, thick like molasses, and nutty rich. I’m trying to ignore the scent and everything it beckons from the past. I know I fail, because the space between the oven and the coffee machine shimmers-a migraine aura, a warning before pain.
I take a breath. I close my eyes. When I open them, it will be there.
The teeny tiny box.
A ding on the oven tells me I've run out of time. My eyelids lift, my vision settles.
The box is made of wood. It has a lid carved delicately with a sycamore tree. The lock is rusty but no less secure than it always has been. There is no key-there never was. And even though I made the teeny tiny box-though I can't remember how, don't know when-even though no one but me can confirm it to be real, I am the only one who's ever used it, seen it, could touch it, though I don't; the sight of it sitting atop that linoleum turns my stomach inside out. I taste acid on my tongue, feel the swish-swash of my vision as it tries to swim away.
I loathe the box, but I would be lost without it.
This much I know: I have somehow designed it to be so.
There aren't many memories from childhood I can still recall with accuracy. Not many I can dust off and admire. Most are inaccessible, locked inside the box. Most should stay that way. But some still stick around, like participation trophies. Little embarrassments or joys, mundane enough that just looking at them doesn't shift the way I hold my body, use my words, sift through my feelings.
These memories remind me that I came from somewhere.
I had a bedroom I decorated with lavender paint and movie posters and a map of the world I would one day see all the way around and back again. I kept my dolls on a bookshelf lined up in a row; my books all had tattered spines and turned-down pages and underlined passages. I hid a black onyx crystal and a set of tarot cards under my bed, along with the necklace my friend Jane gave me to remember her by when she moved away, and a fuzzy pink diary with a lock that I'd stolen from the Kmart a few days before it closed down for good.
The memory about the cookies isn't like that. Still, it never goes away, never changes, despite being unwanted and incomplete. On the days Roger wants closing cookies and the only option in the freezer is peanut butter, it surfaces like a wraith.
My mother was an exceptional baker, but that time she let them burn. The scorched scent cloaked the air and snuck in through the cracks between the two wooden cabinet doors I was hiding behind.
The moments before I climbed in the cabinet and after I was discovered are fuzzy, so I couldn't say what led me to cowering like a kitchen mouse or what my punishment was when I was found. I can remember the way the smoke mingled with dust in the sunlight and the smell of charred peanut butter, rancid and pungent. I can remember eating the edge of a cookie I dug out of the trash, black flesh first.
Mostly, I remember my heart pounding so hard I thought for a second it would break from the walls of my chest and tattle on me as it thumped against the cupboard doors.
Always, I remember her saying, What a nightmare, and she meant me.
"Haven?"
My name, called in a question, breaks through the world of my memory, just in time.
I yank the door of the small electric oven open and pull the cookie tray out. Some of the edges are darker than normal, but since people usually just smell the cookies, I can't imagine that being a problem.
A hand slaps the doorframe. Broad with trimmed nails, a pleasant tan, and a very expensive wristwatch.
Seven minutes ahead of his closing, Roger has arrived.
"There you are," he says.
He releases the doorframe to tighten his tie, smooth his shirt. Pinstripe, blue and white. Dark hair is slicked, probably still damp from a shower at the gym. His eyes drop to the table, where the cookies sit.
"Plate those up. I'll be in my office," he says, cutting a look past me to the clock hanging on the opposite wall. "Give me ten and then bring them back."
He means the clients, not the cookies. I bring the cookies when I bring the clients water. I always ask if they would like anything to drink, and with the exception of the people who brought their own from home in one of those big stupid cups, I've never been told no. We offer coffee and creamer (Folgers and Coffee mate, nothing fancy) and water in recyclable cups despite the fact that Roger refuses to put in a recycling bin, so I have to hide the cups in the broom closet and recycle them at my town house after work.
I don't reply to his order; it's unnecessary at best, superfluous at worst. Roger gives orders because he likes to hear himself talk. I haven't needed them since my second day on staff. I stopped giving responses to him when I realized they didn't register. Watching him walk away as soon as my lips opened once was enough.
He claps his hand against the doorframe again and then pushes off the wood in the direction of his office. My gaze drifts back to the cookies. I finger the rounded edge of one before lifting it off the sheet toward my nose. I take a stiff inhale and close my eyes.
"Oh, and Heaven?" I cringe at his nickname, which is really unsubtle harassment. Roger is back at the door. This time his eyes don't trail or bounce around, they're fixed on me, my face, my nose pressed into the top of the cookie. I draw it away from the tip, but the toasted scent lingers. "Party tomorrow evening. Everything ready?"
The dreaded schmooze fest. A chance for all the title people and commercial dudes (even the women in commercial are classed as dudes) and real estate agents and assistants trying to get ahead to mingle here at Second City, where quality, service, and accuracy converge.
I bought all the supplies, booked a caterer and a bartender. With any luck, Roger will stay out of my way so I can handle setup without his "guidance."
"Everything is ready to go, just have to set up tomorrow after lunch."
He winks and makes a clicking sound with his tongue. It's disgusting. "You're a dream," he says.
I stiffen.
His eyes drop to my blouse and back up to my eyes. Something unspoken but still violating passes through his gaze. He wants to tell me to wear some color and that I should do something with my hair, that I would look pretty if I smiled, especially with a coat of pink on my lips.
None of it is said out loud. All of it is felt.
The box seems to feel it too.
"Anything else?" I ask him, voice high and thin with a crack of nerves.
He doesn't notice. And he doesn't reply to the question.
He leaves with another smack to the doorframe, and now it's just me, the cookies, and that goddamn box. I hold it in my glare as long as I can, because as soon as I look away, I know it will be gone. Vanished into nothing, leaving no residue except for that dull ache of dread at the back of my mind waiting and watching for it to return.
The cookie I picked up before is still clutched in hand; it warms the tips of my fingers. The fragrance dances out of the break room to the hallway and into the lobby to smack clients in the face with good feelings of safety, of home and belonging. I crush the cookie in my fist, watch it crumble over the others and scatter across the parchment like sand.
2
I changed my last name in Tennessee.
My family had gotten my address from the internet too easily, sent me an invite to my brother Buck's wedding. I was twenty-three and renting a whole room all to myself in a house that looked out over the Mississippi River in Memphis. It had a kitchenette and a bathroom with a shower barely big enough for one. I didn't think they'd come all the way there, try to drag me back or anything. They had let me go freely, it wasn't like I was missed.
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