Derrick Walker

The Giving Season

Ethan Cord arrives in Millhaven with a suitcase, a job offer he can't quite remember applying for, and eighteen months of memories that feel like they belong to someone else. The town is perfect. The kind of perfect that should make a man suspicious, except Ethan has been through something terrible he can't fully recall, and the kindness of strangers is the first thing that hasn't hurt in a long time. His cottage is furnished with things he would have chosen himself. His neighbors bring soup before he's unpacked. The archive job gives him structure, purpose, a reason to stay. And Nora — sharp, warm, disarmingly honest about the town's intensity — makes him feel like a person again for the first time since the breakdown erased who he used to be. But Ethan is a journalist by training, and journalists notice things. The archive holds a photograph dated 1952 of a man with his face. The locked basement of his cottage is lined with tally marks in handwriting that looks like his own. Every Sunday, the town gathers for dinner around a table with one empty chair, a full plate, and a question no one will answer. His memories are returning — but they feel less like recovery and more like something being fed to him on a schedule. And the Giving Season, the autumn celebration the town speaks of with quiet reverence, is five weeks away. In the hollows of Appalachia, the land provides. The land protects. And the land collects what it is owed. Some debts are paid in gratitude. Some are paid in blood. And some require you to walk willingly into the dark, believing you are finally going home.