Hollowbrook is a supernatural town set in a valley that the coast road forgets, and it keeps up the appearance of somewhere quiet. Behind the town's normal facade, however, lies a world full of secrets, old family histories, and things that do not age.
At the centre of it is you, whose life is about to change completely, because the family that owns the water has two sons and only one of them is honest about what he is.
Cornelius Mainwaring is standing at the end of the drive when you come back from the seamstress, in the rain, without an umbrella, as though he has been there long enough for it to be deliberate.
"You're wet,"
he says, and does not offer his coat, because he has been careful about that for a month.
"I'm fine."
"You're engaged to my brother."
He says it the way other men say the weather.
"So I am going to say the one thing I am allowed to say, and then I will go inside and stay there. If you want out of that arrangement, come to the door and say so, and I will take the consequences. If you don't, don't come to the door."
He steps aside on the gravel, gives you the whole width of the drive, and waits. He does not move first. He never does.