The fog comes in off the water the morning the foreclosure notice lands on Blythe Prycestead's bench, and the first person through the door of her net loft is the one man who has no right to stand there. Kellan Rookhaven left her three years ago. He is an Under Wolves patch, he is the reason her daughter has grown up without a father in the house, and he says he has come to fight for the loft her mother left her. Blythe has spent her life mending nets, hooking two fingers into the web and ...

Gemma Cranhall can tell gold from the thing that only looks like it. She is a water gilder, second generation, and she has spent twenty years laying real gold leaf so thin you can see light through it, learning by hand the difference between what shines and what has weight. She thought her marriage was gold. She had been living on gilt.Duncan Bickdale is worth billions, and he built a good part of it on a single page Gemma signed without reading, the year she trusted him most, a pa...

Corinne Jessrow builds wooden boats the way her father taught her, by hand, on the north spit of Vernal Reach, and she knows that a hull is fair when the curve runs true the whole length, with no hard spot and no hollow you can feel under your thumb. She thought her marriage ran that true. She had eleven years with Isaiah Radbrook and a daughter and a boatyard, and she thought the line of them was fair.Then she found the messages. Not a motel receipt, not lipstick on a collar. Some...

The warp is the vow. It is strung tight the whole width of the loom, holding everything under one steady tension, and it is not any one day's cloth. It is the thing you true again every morning of your life so the days have something to run through. Nina Zelwick has woven that truth into a hundred coverlets on her grandmother's old barn loom, up a fog-drowned Appalachian holler, and she never once thought she would live to watch her own marriage fray thread by thread until the whole cloth ...

Yvette Warrhurst can feel a lie the way she feels a crooked broom. She binds brooms by hand in her late father's shop, and she knows that a broom sewn tight on the outside but slack at the shoulder stands pretty in the corner and drags crooked the first week you put it to a floor. She has been married to Thaddeus Halrow for eleven years, long enough to think their life together was built true. Then, at their own anniversary gala, in front of the whole town, her husband was handed a folder ...

Philippa Radbury reads people the way she reads her indigo vat. Dye goes into the vat green and only strikes blue when it is lifted into the air, and a truth kept under the surface stays green and rinses away to nothing. She spent six years married to Tristan Nethshaw, a man worth billions, and for six years she trusted that what was between them would hold in the light. Then someone told him she had only married him for the land under her family's old works, and he believed it, and he did...

Nora Inkson makes the purest tupelo honey on the Rockvale Creek swamp, and she knows the one thing about it that no one else seems to: pure tupelo never grains. Cut it to stretch it, and no matter how clear it pours in the jar, a season later the sugar comes up white and the lie tells on itself. She has built a life on that patience. She did not know she would need it to survive her own marriage.On the night of her twenty-second anniversary, someone hands her billionaire husband a ...

You cannot take back a bad shift. The buzzer on it has already gone, and all you get is the next shift, and how you take it. It took me losing everything to learn what that means.I had it all once. A spot near the top of the league, a wife who saw the whole of me and stayed anyway, a little girl who thought I hung the moon. And in the lowest, most frightened stretch of a dying career, on the road, half drunk and certain I was finished, I threw it away in one night I will spend the ...

Cecily Crancombe grows what almost nobody else will. On the land her father left her outside Wilkes Creek, she raises native prairie seed, and she knows the hard truth of it that the town has forgotten: the toughest seed will not wake in warmth. Wild indigo, leadplant, prairie smoke, they have to lie through a whole cold, wet winter first. The freeze that looks like it should kill them is the only thing that ever lets them come up. She married a billionaire and she thought love worked the ...

Rosanna Mireleigh grabbed her nephew out of the path of a rolling tanker, and forty-one seconds of it went up online cut to look like she had hurt him. By morning the clip had twenty-two million views and a hashtag. By nightfall the whole world had decided who she was, and the one man who could have stood up and said it was a lie stood in his glass office and said nothing.She had spent eleven years married to Leland Mireleigh's money and his machine, and she had spent her working l...

Annika Stanridge can put a number on anything. She grades grain for a living, one bite of a kernel and she knows what is sound and what is hollow all the way through, and she has never met a man she could not read the same way. Then she takes over the failing country elevator in Yarrow Flats and walks straight into five of them. The Inferno Demon Riders wear their patches like a dare, they blame her family for a brother who died in an ambush two years gone, and they mean to run her out of ...

Verena Copeby can read a rotted core through a perfect skin. She grades sponges for a living on the last independent dock in Perdido Harbor, one slow squeeze of her hand and she knows what is sound all the way through and what will collapse the first time the world leans on it. She thought she knew her husband the same way. Then the whole town found out about his affair before she did, on the big screen at the Blessing of the Fleet, with their daughter's hand in hers and the cameras alread...