Beau Miller hadn’t seen Maple Hollow in twenty years, but the place still stank like moldy corn and old sins.

  He stepped out of his rented car into the damp April air and looked around like he had just cracked open a coffin. Nothing had changed. Same chipped white church at the end of Hollow Road. Same peeling diner signs and dirt-streaked gas pumps. The same old men on the same damn bench outside the hardware store, glaring at him like they recognized his face and never liked it.

  Maybe they did. Maybe everyone did.

  Maple Hollow had a memory like a barn cat, mean and long. It remembered who you were, who your parents were, and who you groped behind the church during prom. You couldn’t hide in a town like this. Not from your past. Not from yourself.

  The funeral was small, just like he expected. Closed casket. Some whispered that was for the best. Roy Miller had not died peacefully. He had been found in the woods with half his face gone, torn off by wild dogs or something worse. They buried him with a photo tacked to the lid of the casket. Roy Miller, young and grinning, arm around Beau’s mom, back when she was still alive.

  Beau stood at the edge of the churchyard with his hands in his pockets, trying not to puke. Not because of grief. That had drained out of him somewhere along the interstate. But because of who was walking up the gravel path in a black mourning dress cut too tight and heels too high for a funeral.

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  Cassie Juno.

  She had been the hottest girl in school. Captain of the cheer team. Blonde. Blue-eyed. Curvy in all the places teenage boys dream about. The kind of girl who could make you forget your locker combination with one look. Now she was thirty-eight, just like him. Only hotter. Only curvier. Something in the way her hips swayed made his mouth dry. Something in her eyes made his stomach turn. Her eyes glittered like she knew secrets he didn’t want to learn. She hadn’t aged so much as ripened. Still the hottest woman in town.

  She wrapped her arms around him without asking. Her hug lingered too long. Her breasts pressed against his chest. Her perfume hadn’t changed. Still strawberries. Still sin.

  "I missed you, Beau," she said, her lips brushing his ear.

  Beau swallowed hard. His voice caught somewhere between his ribs and regret. She had not changed, not really. Just got more gorgeous.

  It had been twenty years since he left this town behind. Twenty years since he last saw her. Twenty years since the killings.

  He looked past her toward the cornfields swaying behind the church, tall and thick and whispering in the wind. They always whispered here. They never stopped.

  Maple Hollow was a place that clung to its secrets. A place where the past never stayed buried. A place that watched and waited.

  Beau felt something cold crawl down his spine.

  He had come back to bury a father he hadn’t spoken to in two decades.

  But something else had been waiting for him.

  And it was not done yet.