Colder Than Ice

She tried to end one lie. Something older and colder wouldn't let her. Meredith has done everything expected of her. She has tended the garden, kept the house, taken attendance, worn the ring. She has a husband who collects vintage cars and a son who orbits his father like a second satellite. She has arranged her life into neat, separate compartments — and she has told herself the compartments hold. Now she is trying to close the last one. One final meeting. One clean severance from the man she found on an anonymous website, the affair she conducted in hotels paid for with gift cards and cash. It should be simple. A goodbye over green tea. But a girl sits down across from her instead — pale, barefoot, furious — claiming to be someone who cannot possibly exist. And in the days that follow, the compartments begin to crack. Strange growths appear on Meredith's skin. Her tears freeze on her cheeks. Vegetables from her garden show up where she knows she didn't put them. The girl keeps returning, and she is not the only one. Colder Than Ice is a work of dark literary fiction that moves like a slow frost across glass — quiet, inexorable, and deeply disorienting. Told entirely from the interior of a woman unraveling in real time, it is a story about the lives we abort when we fail to live the ones we have, and what those unlived lives might do if they could reach us. For readers of psychological horror, weird fiction, and literary suspense who want their dread served cold. Read by an award-winning narrator.