In Cane County, some secrets get buried so deep they start to look like roots. And some roots, if you pull hard enough, bring the whole tree down.

Hadley Dawkins never wanted to come home. But when the town offers her the badge of Reed Langley, the boy she left behind who became the man someone murdered, she takes it. She takes it because her brother has finally been released from prison after nearly twenty years for a crime he didn't commit, and she owes him something she doesn't have words for yet. And maybe, if she's honest with herself, she takes it because she's spent twenty years running and she's tired.

Mason is free, but freedom and innocence aren't the same thing. Not in Cane County. Hadley is trying to learn her brother again, who he is now, what the years made of him, whether the distance between them is something that can be closed or just something they'll have to live with. It isn't easy. Neither is wearing a dead man's badge in a town where the Dawkins name has never sat right.

And someone doesn't like how close she's getting to the truth about Reed.

They've been careful and patient. But desperation has a way of making careful people reckless. Hadley came back to Cane County to make things right, but someone intends to make sure she doesn't get the chance.
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“The Threshing Man doesn’t chase you into the field. He waits for you to walk in on your own. He’s patient. He was there when your people were born here, and he’ll be there when they put you in the ground.”