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Nice Collins has spent her whole life blocking her past by trying to protect children she doesn’t know. Nice is a halfway out of the closet lesbian in a time when that word could cost you—so she keeps mostly to herself with her heart firmly out of reach. Then, on the same day, two things break her careful control: her brother, missing for the past ten years, resurfaces, bringing back more than bad memories. Then a routine child-welfare check takes her to a remote farm where she meets the ferocious mother, Figgy Harrington.

Nice expects the case to close in thirty days, but after a fire, her boss starts calling the farm a cult and the investigation career-making. And Nice isn’t sure what to call her thoughts about Figgy—or the growing suspicion that there is more to the case than Figgy is revealing.

What follows is a forbidden-love, opposites-attract, slow-burn love story between two women who shouldn’t trust each other, set against small-town gossip, institutional homophobia, 1980s queer paranoia, and Satanic Panic. It’s about found family, morally grey authority figures willing to ruin lives to come out ahead, and the AIDS epidemic no one wants to speak of. Nice has to choose again and again between doing her duty or living her truth.

Readers who love lesbian historical fiction, sapphic romantic suspense, secrets and lies in small-town settings, redemption arcs, a whodunit, and stories where love costs will find that here.

There are no clean answers in this novel—only the hard, human work of deciding what you can live with—and what you can’t live without.