The Ash Between Names
Southern Gothic · The American South · 13 chapters · 29,629 words · free EPUB + audiobook
Wren Halloway inherits her father’s funeral home and finds three decades of cremation fraud in the ledgers — a reckoning with what the living owe the dead, and what daughters owe their fathers.
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AI-narrated, one MP3 per chapter · 231.1 MB total
- Chapter 1download (16.9 MB)
- Chapter 2download (17.5 MB)
- Chapter 3download (25.9 MB)
- Chapter 4download (18.4 MB)
- Chapter 5download (16.2 MB)
- Chapter 6download (15.1 MB)
- Chapter 7download (12.2 MB)
- Chapter 8download (27.2 MB)
- Chapter 9download (23.0 MB)
- Chapter 10download (17.0 MB)
- Chapter 11download (14.9 MB)
- Chapter 12download (14.6 MB)
- Chapter 13download (12.2 MB)
From Chapter 1
The train left the town behind before Wren had properly registered that she was leaving it. She watched the station platform shrink through the glass pane—three figures standing in the grey light, a stack of wooden crates, the skeletal outline of the water tower—and then the landscape folded itself into trees and then into nothing. Her reflection in the window was pale and indistinct, a ghost superimposed over the passing fields. She pressed her palm flat against the cold surface and felt the vibration of the tracks travel up her arm, a steady, rhythmic hum that matched the throbbing behind her eyes.
She had not cried at the reading of the will. She had not cried when they lowered the casket into the damp earth. Now, three days into the journey back, with the air growing thicker and warmer with every mile, the tears came without warning. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, angry at the betrayal of her own body. Grief was a discipline, her father had once told her, something to be managed like a ledger. You allocated your sorrow in portions, you balanced the books, and you kept the accounts clear. But the ledger was closed now, and Wren was alone with the silence.
The carriage was nearly empty. A farmer in a worn cap slept in the corner, his mouth open, a string of saliva catching the dusty light. An elderly woman knitted something grey and shapeless, the needles clicking a slow counter-rhythm to the wheels. Wren stared out at the blurring green, counting the seconds between the telegraph poles, trying to anchor herself in the tangible mathematics of distance and time. Three hundred miles from the city. Twelve hours on the railway. One lifetime of debt.
When the train finally slowed, the air that seeped through the cracked window was heavy, saturated with moisture and the scent of decaying vegetation. It was a smell she remembered from childhood—wet earth, rotting leaves, the deep, fungal musk of the swampy ground that surrounded the town. It was the smell of things left to decompose in the dark.