Bells for the River

Beneath the sycamores of a small Tennessee town, a copper bell waits in the crook of a cedar, and the river keeps its own quiet grammar. When the county fair stutters and a wheel hangs a breath too long over Miller's Bend, Ivy—keeper of a stubborn old house and its equally stubborn bell—feels the ridge change its mind. Names blur on headstones, shadows wander off, and compliments try to pass as currency. The town doesn't need a hero; it needs someone who knows how to mend.

With Hollis—the river's taciturn son who understands water the way a carpenter understands grain—Ivy begins to teach Sycamore Hollow a new kind of keeping. They anchor stories with paper sleeves and twine, weigh truth with creek-cold tins, rescue endings with tin-can lines strung from porch to porch. As summer ripens toward frost, the old spirits that live in the hills—The Un-namer, the Husher, the Tallener, and worse—test every seam they stitch. Love comes on like weather: first as a rumor, then as work, finally as a room they both can live in.