I spent thirty years watching people come home.

Not to my salon — to town. You can always tell. They sit down in the chair and before I've even got the cape snapped they're explaining themselves. Just here for the weekend. Just settling Mom's estate. Just passing through. Nobody announces they're passing through unless some part of them is afraid they're not.

That's where Aqua's Net starts.

Blair Cole left Monet, Kansas six years ago and built herself a whole life somewhere else, which is a thing you can absolutely do. Then her mother wrecks her car, and Blair comes back to handle it. Quick trip. Practical plan. In and out.

Small towns do not respect practical plans. I could have told her that.

Here's the thing about the town you grew up in: it remembers you. Not the you that exists now — the you it decided on years ago, the one attached to every sidewalk and every last name. Blair's barely off the highway before people are calling her by her married name, which would sting less if the lead detective in town weren't the man who gave it to her.

And then Blair has a screaming match on a public sidewalk with Renee Harmon — the woman she blames for her divorce — and hours later, Renee is dead. Suddenly the version of Blair this town remembers isn't just annoying. It's evidence.

She can't leave without looking guilty. She can't stay without facing every single thing she left. So the question in this book was never just who killed Renee. It's whether you can come home without turning back into your past — whether Blair gets to decide who she is, when a whole town is quite sure it already knows.

Thirty years behind the chair taught me that everybody's carrying a version of that question. Blair just has to answer hers with a murder charge hanging over it.

Aqua's Net is out now. I'd tell you how it ends, but I've been keeping secrets professionally since the nineties.

It's release day, so grab your copy today in Kindle Unlimited