Angol
What the Path Carries
For two and a half years, Dav Wren has been exactly as safe as staying allows.
Then the trail out of Lantern Basin reappears with the thaw - and for the first time since he arrived half-broken and hoping no one would ask questions, Dav has to decide whether to walk it.
Down in the world he left, a footbridge he built years ago failed in exactly the place his own attention did, and Hartwell hasn't forgotten. His old mentor, master timber framer Sully Voss, isn't sure he wants Dav anywhere near a crew again. The town has settled into a wary, careful politeness. And his sister Petra has spent two and a half years keeping the family store - and a chair at her table - for a brother who left without much of an explanation.
Dav didn't come down to be forgiven. He came to find out whether the part of him that notices, that builds, that cares - the part the basin taught him to trust again - can hold up when something real is riding on it.
Rebuilding the bridge means rebuilding everything else first: his standing with Voss, his sister's guarded love, and a question he never had to ask up in the basin, because up there, nothing ever required choosing.
What the Path Carries is a quiet, aching story about return, repair, and the difference between a place that will have you and a place you decide, finally, to come home to - for readers of The House in the Cerulean Sea, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, and Legends & Lattes.
Book 2 of the Lantern Series
