You buried a dog when you were eleven. You never told anyone. Not your mother. Not your husband. Not a single living person in thirty-five years.A barefoot stranger in a Walmart just said its name out loud.Thea Cole lives alone in rural Kentucky. She moved to Hazel for the silence. She works from home.
She talks to no one. She built a life designed to be invisible, and it was working until a woman she'd never met walked into a Walmart and started screaming her social security number, her birthday, her mother's maiden name, and details about her childhood that exist nowhere except inside her own skull.The woman gave the police Thea's name. Her exact name. Her exact date of birth. Not because she stole them.Because she believed she was Thea.The officer who processed her said she wasn't crazy. He said she was just sure.Three miles from Thea's house there is a bunker. Inside the bunker there are files.
Inside the files there is her name. Twice. Same weight. Same blood type. Same birthday. Filed one week apart.
One stamped in faded red ink: PRIMARY. One stamped in faded red ink: DERIVED.Thea is a medical transcriptionist. She processes data for a living. She is very good at it. She is going to need to be, because the data she's about to uncover will reach back to the day she was born and forward to a choice she is not prepared to make, and every answer she finds will be worse than the question that led to it.What she finds in that bunker is only the beginning. What finds her is the rest of the book.
