When Walls Weep

Maribel Ward remembers a beautiful childhood.

Her sister remembers surviving it.

Identical twins Belle and Iris Ward grew up in Double Branch, South Carolina, in the old family house they jokingly called the Prison Ward. Iris spent her childhood counting the days until she could abscond. Belle was never quite sure what there was to escape from.

Years later, their grandparents are gone, the house is empty, and Belle buys it back.

For an aspiring writer searching for her next story, the Ward House is irresistible: generations of family history, rooms full of forgotten things, and a sprawling old library untouched for years. She decides to renovate the place herself, documenting the transformation online as she turns the crumbling house into something beautiful.

Belle has always loved a good beast.

And she has every intention of taming this one.

But old houses keep more than books.

Behind shelves and beneath layers of wallpaper, Belle begins finding pieces of a family history no one bothered to write down. The Double Branch gossips are happy to supply the rest. Old scandals. Old violence. Stories that change depending on who is talking.

Then the house begins telling stories of its own.

Objects move. Dishes shatter. Things are ripped from shelves. And soon, whatever is moving through the Ward House seems capable of destroying Belle, too. What begins as a haunting becomes something physical, violent, and increasingly difficult to explain.

Belle calls Iris, but her sister remains distant, cold, and stubbornly unwilling to come home.

So Belle turns to Trey.

Her ex-boyfriend. Her old knight in shining armor. The man who always seems to know how to fix everything.

When things fall apart, Trey is always there. He helps Belle repair the house and make sense of what she is uncovering.

Belle desperately wants a safe house.

Iris knows better than anyone that coming home isn't always the same thing as being safe.

She remembers the Ward House.

She remembers what lived inside it.

And she knows that two people can grow up beneath the same roof and leave with entirely different stories about what happened there.

Some houses are haunted by the dead.

Some are haunted by what the living refuse to see.

And when walls weep, the truth has a way of seeping through.