The Wrack-Crafter's Fathom: Tidewatch Chronicles Book 2

The lamp is lit. The mug is reached for without looking. Aurora Voss has spent eighteen months building the plainest, most ordinary life a woman who faked her own death thirty years ago could ask for - and it has almost worked.Then the sea starts giving back what it swallowed.The original pact between Tidewatch and the entity beneath it is surfacing from the ocean floor, document by document, addressed to the lighthouse keeper. And the woman who sank them has just stepped off the trade vessel - carrying the deep-ocean courts' agenda, a partial translation, and thirty years of evidence Aurora spent her whole new life trying to file under: closed.Aurora recognized her before she cleared the gangplank. Her cat did not approve. Neither did her filing system, which has run smoothly for eighteen months and was not built for this.She can run the investigation the way she's run everything else - carefully, at a professional distance, giving Tidewatch the edited version of her. Or she can let the harbor master who leaves notes she mostly answers, the mentor who feeds her more than she asks, the priest who wants to learn what she knows, and the town that already decided to keep her, watch her work at full depth - as what she actually is.Thirty years of training says: don't get attached to people who can't hold the whole truth. Tidewatch has other ideas.For readers of Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde novels and T. Kingfisher's Paladin's Grace - dry-witted women, deadpan comedy, competence under pressure - comes the second book in a trilogy about what belonging costs when it's finally tested, and what it gives back when it holds.