Bury The Fruit

Neasa Kavanagh has always known the orchard keeps score. On the edge of a Wicklow village, where fog clings low and wind knows every doorway by name, the Kavanagh orchard has stood for generations. Apples red as bruises. Stone rings older than stories. A wrought-iron gate that moans warnings into the rain. Locals say the land remembers. Neasa learned young that remembering is never neutral. She returns home expecting to harvest fruit and heal quietly from a heartbreak she refuses to name. Instead, she finds the valley holding its breath. Redhand boys prowl the lanes, delivering messages for men too important—or too cowardly—to show their own faces. A family heirloom surfaces where it doesn't belong. And a leather mask, stitched with careful cruelty, pulls an old legend screaming into the present. Then there's Cillian Doyle. Baker. Stubborn optimist. The boy who once made Neasa believe that roots and wings could coexist. He has a box that belonged to his father… and perhaps to someone darker before him. He swears it's just a relic. Neasa can feel the orchard hum in her bones and knows better. Some inheritances don't stay buried, and some debts expect to be paid in breath and memory. As Neasa and Cillian untangle truth from superstition, the orchard tightens its hold. Walls that were meant to protect begin closing in. Secrets scatter like seeds down the rows. Every choice cuts—between loyalty and survival, love and self-preservation, legacy and liberation. The orchard will take what it is owed. The only question is who will be left standing when the season turns. Atmospheric, romantic, and pulsing with the ache of inherited scars, Bury the Fruit is a contemporary Irish romantic suspense about patterns that repeat, loves that refuse to be erased, and the courage required to claim a future not written by the past. For readers who crave lyrical tension, grounded heat, and characters who dare to choose tenderness when fear demands cruelty. Because in this valley, fruit grows only where the roots remember pain— and love is the bravest harvest of all.