Where the Paper Birds Fly Home

Eleanor Bennett has built her career by giving other people the words they cannot find.As a professional ghostwriter, she knows how to enter another person’s mind, imitate their voice, and turn guilt into something the world can forgive. So when she is offered an extraordinary commission at the isolated Blackwood Estate, she sees it as the opportunity of a lifetime. The mysterious Theodore Walsh is dying, and he wants Eleanor to write a series of letters to his estranged daughter, Dahlia-a daughter who, according to the official story, vanished years ago.But Eleanor’s mother reacts to the Walsh name with a terror she cannot explain.Then Eleanor arrives at Blackwood.The mansion is less a home than a carefully constructed prison. Surveillance cameras hide behind the walls. The East Wing is forbidden. Strange scratching sounds move through the passages at night. And wherever Eleanor goes, she finds delicate paper birds-cranes, hawks, and other folded creatures carrying fragments of warnings from someone hiding inside the house.Her greatest discovery comes when she finally meets the man calling himself Theodore Walsh.He is far too young. His medical history does not match the records. A jagged surgical scar on his hand exposes the first crack in his carefully constructed identity. Eleanor soon discovers the impossible truth: Theodore Walsh is dead, and the man who has taken his name is Sebastian Drake, a brilliant and obsessive protégé who murdered his way into the Walsh legacy and spent years reconstructing the dead man’s life.But Sebastian did not bring Eleanor to Blackwood merely to write letters.He brought her there because she is part of the story.As Eleanor searches the family archives, she begins experiencing memories that cannot belong to her-fragments of childhood, forgotten conversations, and intimate details from a life she has never lived. Her mother’s lies begin to unravel. The name Eleanor Bennett becomes increasingly uncertain. And behind the walls, a living woman finally reveals herself.Dahlia survived.Hidden inside the secret architecture of Blackwood, Dahlia has been leaving paper birds as messages and collecting evidence of Sebastian’s crimes. She knows what happened twenty years ago. She knows why Eleanor was taken from her original life. And she knows Sebastian’s final plan.He intends to transform Eleanor into the perfect heir-the missing daughter, the legitimate face of his stolen empire, and the final piece that will make his entire deception permanent.For Eleanor, the horrifying revelation is that she has spent her entire life being ghostwritten by someone else.Now she must decide whether to accept the identity Sebastian has created for her-or destroy the entire story.With Blackwood closing around them, surveillance watching every move, and the mansion’s hidden passages becoming a battlefield, Eleanor turns the one weapon Sebastian never understood against him: the power to control the narrative.But exposing the truth may cost more than her identity.It may cost her life.And when the paper birds finally take flight, the secrets of Blackwood will burn with them.