The letter arrives on a Saturday, addressed in handwriting Mateo Reyes-Whitefeather hasn't seen in years - his father's. It carries no apology and no explanation. Only an invitation: come back to Black Fork Hollow.
The hollow is where his father's people have always lived, tucked into mountains that don't appear quite right on any map. There's Della, who runs the store and knows more than she says. There's Hannah at the creek. There's a church with a choir-loft door nobody opens, a pastor who watches from doorways, and something tall that stands at the tree line at dusk - patient, antlered, waiting to be acknowledged.
Because in Black Fork Hollow, the land is not scenery. It remembers. It chooses. And it has been waiting a long time for one of its own to come home.
Mateo came to bury old questions about his father. Instead he finds an inheritance older than the family name - and a choice about what he's willing to become to keep it.
The land does not want servants. It wants kin.
A folk horror novel from the author of The Curse of the Bronx King and The Hollow Below.
