Love
The bonds that war tests, and distance cannot erase.
Memory lives in the land, and in the names carried forward.
I. The Story
A mystery carried downriver
In the mountains of western North Carolina and east Tennessee, the past is never truly gone.
When Fidel Phillips' father is found dead along the French Broad River, the explanation comes easily: a fall, a dark night, a man who had been drinking. But something about it does not sit right.
As Fidel retraces the final hours of his father's life, he is drawn back into the world he once crossed in silence. It was a world shaped by the Civil War, divided loyalties, and the fragile trust between neighbors who no longer knew where they stood.
