After thirteen years, love can no longer stay silent.
Thea Voss and Morgan Ashford are experts. Thea at leaving; Morgan at waiting.
Thea needs the world to look. She's won major awards for photographic essays on the forgotten victims of conflict and disaster. Victims everyone else would rather turn away from. The price is a life constantly in motion. Thea has nowhere, and no one, to call home.
Morgan fights wildfires that grow fiercer every season, doing her best to preserve the land. But pulling people from the flames, saving as many as she can, is her self-imposed duty to atone for the one she failed to protect.
Thirteen years ago in high school, they were inseparable: Morgan, the star cross-country runner, and Hannah, the photographer on the scene to capture her every win. On Hannah's eighteenth birthday, Morgan waited on her porch while her best friend came out to her family. Hannah had planned to deliver a second confession to Morgan that night. Instead, she vanished without a goodbye.
In the years of silence that followed, Hannah Devlin forged a new life for herself as Thea Voss.
Recovering from a bullet wound, Thea takes what should be a less stressful assignment: covering the victims of a wildfire. But it’s burning next to the hometown she has never once returned to. The same fire Morgan is fighting.
Now, two women who can face the cruelest brutalities of humanity and nature are forced to face each other and the guilt they both carry. They must learn to see past the afterimage that burned into each of them the night Hannah disappeared. The love it hides will require each of them to do the one thing they’ve never done.
Morgan will have to ask, and Thea will have to stay.
