Cozy town. Filthy books.

Last October the county assigned Rilla Currence to Anse Rexrode. She walked up his steps in front of forty people, and he shut the door in her face without a word of why.

This year the clerk assigned her to him again. Then the creek takes the bridge out, her suppressants have sixty hours left in them, and the valley closes with the two of them inside it.

She'll take the week. She's not giving him forgiveness.

Dovie Sponaugle has picked fruit in eleven counties in eight years and never once been on a door. She came up for the last of the cider crop. Nobody told her what October does to this valley, and the bunkhouse padlocks on the first.

The only address left with a bed in it is the Teter farmhouse. There are three alphas under that roof, and one of them took it off the list two years ago and won't say why.

She isn't choosing between them. That was never on the table.

Meda Renick came home to Kettle Hollow for a weekend in September to clear out her dead father's house. It's October now. She's still there, and her suppressants ran out three days ago.

Harlan Lockridge ran the mill beside her father for twenty years and buried him in March. He's the only alpha in this valley her father would have trusted with her.

That's the problem. He stopped thinking of her as a kid a long time ago. He's never said so out loud.