Winter Claim

Maren is forty-six, nineteen months a widow, and very good at finding out who really owns the land. She came to Sisu Bay, at the top of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, for six weeks of title work. Then the snow closed the road.

Out here it falls twenty feet a year. The town is kind to her and tells her nothing. Every morning her drive is already clear, and no one will say by whom.

Nick appears fifty. He has been in this county for more than a century, and what he owns is not the ground but everything underneath it. He is patient, courteous, and careful with his hands. There is one house in Sisu Bay he cannot enter, and she is sleeping in it. There is one place on her land he can — the sauna.

Two grown-ups. One long, dark winter. A line he swore he’d never cross, and something in the dark that is coming for her. Maren has stopped being careful. That makes her very dangerous to want.