The Orchard of Missing Girls

When a teenager vanishes from her family's century-old orchard, one woman must confront a secret her family has spent three generations trying to bury.

Early morning, present day: Del Amaro finds an overturned ladder in Row Fourteen — and an empty bed that was never slept in. Her cousin Sadie is gone. And she isn't the first child this land has lost.

Fourteen years earlier, Del's uncle Peter disappeared from these same rows without a trace, a wound the Whitfield family sealed shut with silence instead of answers. As search teams comb the property and old secrets begin to surface, Del is pulled into a story that stretches back over a century — to a seventeen-year-old picker named Marianne, inexplicably drawn to the orchard's oldest, most unsettling tree in the summer of 1987; to a foreman who has kept a family's darkest ledger for thirty years; and to a matriarch, Eleanor Whitfield, whose composure has always concealed exactly how much she chose not to ask.

Moving between two summers three decades apart, The Orchard of Missing Girls is a taut, atmospheric novel about the stories families tell to survive — and what it costs when an entire community decides some truths are easier left buried than spoken.