The Keeping

A reunion is a day. A keeping is a life.

Lia is sixteen, and she keeps the arch. Each morning she walks the river road, past the ferry, downstream toward the bend - and each morning the stone beside her own name is blank.

Then the tune changes. The old tune, the one that crossed ninety-four years to find its way home, has always ended going down. Now its third line goes up. And somewhere downstream, another girl is waking with the same tune in her mouth.

At the Oakbrook fair, between the two towns, two doll-makers set up side by side - same hands, same stitch, same face. A lifelike doll, made by a grandmother's hands, carries stitching no one has ever read. A picture on a nursing home wall hides a paper. A paper points to a journal buried under the first stone of the story.

To read it, Lia must face what her family kept hidden: a promise, a taking, and a sister she never knew she had.

The Keeping is Book Two of The Covenant Arch - a story of twin sisters, hidden truth, and the work after the reunion: truth at the table, and a name carved beside another.