The Nurse She Buried

Meridian Wells buried its nurses in the first year of the Blight. Two remain, and neither one is telling the truth. Ada Oyinbo runs the town's last clinic. She treats the coughs and the births and the quiet wounds, and she does not ask the founders why her sister's name is not spoken. Then a young man dies of a disease no one in Meridian Wells is supposed to have, and his body disappears from her clinic before morning. The files she opens were not supposed to exist. Ten years of vaccination records, all forged, all signed by the same people who sit on the town council. Including Constance Pell — the woman who taught Ada her trade, and who has been mayor for seven years. Constance does not deny it. She explains it. And what she explains is worse than a lie. A spare, quietly devastating survival romance for readers who understand that the hardest thing to protect is a town's belief in itself.