The Lives We Owe

Nobody dies in Coldbrook. Somebody paid for that.For eleven years, the small Connecticut town has buried 113 fewer people than mathematics allows. Ambulances still run. Cars still crash. Children still fall through ice. Somehow, everyone comes home.Forensic actuary June Mehrotra is sent to find the fraud inside those impossible numbers. Instead, she finds a policy written against the non-occurrence of an entire town, a wet glove from a drowning that never happened, and a courteous old man buying evidence from Tuesdays no one else remembers.He could not send a message into the past. So he kept only the worlds in which it arrived.Now Coldbrook's miracles are being repossessed. Records change. Successes reverse. People disappear first from databases, then from memory. To save the town, June must decide whether a perfect outcome is still good when the people who paid for it have been erased from the account.Nothing comes back for free.A mind-bending speculative thriller about luck, grief, consent, and the cost of getting exactly what you want.