Twelve brides. Three hundred years. A house that has never lost one it wanted to keep.
Aldermere Hall has been waiting for her.
Elisabeth Hargrove knows this the way she knows water damage on a manuscript: not from the visible stain but from the buckle beneath it. She is an archivist. She reads what documents try to hide. And the sketchbook hidden in her satchel, left by a woman who vanished two centuries ago, is trying to hide something extraordinary.
She arrives at the crumbling estate to marry a man she has never met, a union arranged by a family that has been sending brides to this house for three hundred years. In the portrait gallery, eleven paintings show eleven women in the same dress, wearing the same impossible smile. The twelfth hook on the wall is waiting. The dress is aired and ready. And the roses, hundreds of white roses that should not be blooming in late September, are warm to the touch.
The house is beautiful. Every account says so. Beautiful the way a jaw is beautiful when it opens.
Something ancient lives beneath Aldermere's roots. It has consumed every bride who came before, and it learns from each woman it takes. It has been learning for a very long time.
Elisabeth is the twelfth bride. She has come with a plan and a sketchbook full of warnings.
For readers of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Katherine Arden, and Naomi Novik. Fans of Mexican Gothic, Uprooted, and Rebecca will feel at home. If "home" is a house that watches you sleep.
