Nine Doors to Ashwick: A Gothic Novel

Wren Calloway restores broken things for a living. She's about to inherit one she can't fix with paste and thread.When a great-aunt she's never met leaves her a crumbling manor on the Yorkshire coast, Wren expects an inheritance-tax headache - not a house with nine doors along one corridor, each opening onto a different century of its own history. Behind them: nine versions of the same woman, split across three hundred years by a bargain her husband made to keep her from dying all at once.The doors are sealing. One every eight days, in the order they first opened - and whoever's standing inside when a door closes stays there, forever, aging out a life that was never meant to be theirs.Wren has weeks to undo a promise she didn't make, guided only by a groundskeeper who's already lost forty years of himself to the house, and hunted by a cousin who'd rather sell the family's secret piece by piece than see it closed for good.The deeper she goes, the more she finds her own name folded into the house's oldest records - three hundred years back, under a different spelling.Some houses keep their dead. This one kept something worse: nine women, still waiting to be whole.