Two sisters. One sinking house. A dead father on the dock and twenty-five years of lies buried under the floorboards.

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Mara never left Bayview. She works the same water that took her mother, hauls oysters in the dark, and holds the Whitaker house together with her hands and her silence. Riley left at seventeen and built a life in Washington designed to forget everything — the dock, the marsh, the bottles behind the books, and the sister she stopped calling. They haven't spoken in fifteen years. Then their father dies and Mara leaves a voicemail: Dad's dead. Funeral's Thursday. Come.

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What starts as a funeral becomes an excavation. A nor'easter is closing in. The house is flooding. And in the attic, inside a locked box sealed for a quarter century, the sisters find their mother's journals — and the story Bayview swore it would never tell.

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Delia Whitaker didn't drown in a boating accident. She was trying to leave. She was in love with Elijah Turner, a Black waterman from the other side of the creek bridge. What happened on the dock that October night in 2000 was witnessed, covered up, and buried by a town that decided silence was cheaper than justice. The sheriff wrote the report. The co-op filed the incident. The church held the funeral. And nobody said a word for twenty-five years — until the storm pulled the walls down and two daughters finally found what the water had been holding.

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Between the Tides is a novel about the weight of secrets carried in the body — in the jaw, the shoulders, the breath, the distance between two people who used to share a room. It is about what towns bury, what water returns, and what happens when two women stop bracing long enough to feel what they have been carrying their entire lives.

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This is Southern Gothic with a pulse. Literary suspense with dirt under its fingernails. A family mystery told through the body as much as the mind.

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For readers of William Kent Krueger, Wiley Cash, Chris Whitaker, and Tana French.