This is an excerpt from River’s Rowan, the forthcoming novel: there are a lot more excerpts that can be found here.

Hi, Eden. It’s Willow, from school, Willow Collins. I wrote Willow’s Word. I’m here, too. Are you okay? Can you write back, please? I’m not sure that this hiding spot will work for long. What if Nan or somebody tries to restock things? I have to stay in the room, I can’t go out, I don’t want to. I’ll look for your next letter under the mattress of the bed, upper left hand side. What happened to you? I have an ankle bracelet. He watches me all the time.

Willow! I knew you were here. I am okay. Are you hurt? I think the others are here too. Brielle and Sierra. Have you seen them, or talked to them? He tricked me. He told me he had found some things of Brielle’s in River’s room and wanted to get them to Brielle’s family. I shouldn’t have come with him, but I did. He keeps me in a place he calls The Radical Redress. It’s a room with nothing in it. But he says he wants to get to know me, so he sometimes lets me come to the house. Nobody really talks much in the house to me. Do you go to the Radical Redress, too? If you do, is the room empty, nothing at all, and completely dark? There’s no light and there’s no window. It’s just blackness all the time. I can’t wait to get out of there. The house is better than that. Yes, I have an ankle bracelet on too, but I’ve been working on an idea. I think I know how to get the ankle bracelet off. I don’t like this hiding spot. For one, Nan changes the sheets and she might find it. For two, I need to talk to Brielle. She’s my best friend in the whole world, I’m scared of what’s happened to her. I left the letter you found there weeks ago. If we hide the letters too well, Sierra or Brielle won’t find them. I’ll look for your next letter in the back of the Great Gatsby book that’s been in the same spot since I first got here. It’s in the desk drawer.

If we’re caught writing letters, he’ll kill us. I get wanting to talk to the others, but what if they aren’t here? Are you sure he took them, too? I know you and Brielle were close. What do you think she’d do when she comes to the house? Sierra is the pole vaulter. She’s the one who went to that march. I think she would exercise somehow. What about leaving a note in the gym somewhere? Can you find a place there? The Radical Redress is not dark. It’s light all the time, never dark. I wish it was dark. It has mirrors on every wall. It’s honestly torture. How can we get these things off?

I don’t know if we can get them off, my idea hasn’t worked yet, but I’m thinking about it. That’s a really good idea about Sierra exercising. I went to the gym; there’s not a lot of places to hide things there. I wrote a really short note. I dropped the note in the center of one of the rolled up yoga mats. No idea if anybody ever touches those things or not but it was the only thing I could do and not get caught by the cameras. Today was really hard. It’s my mom’s birthday. I miss her a lot; we move around a lot, so she’s all I really have. I don’t feel good today, and I wish I could see Mom. I want to go home.

I don’t know if Sierra does yoga or not. She kind of seems too hard core for something like that. I don’t know if my mom would want to see me right now.

Why do you say that? When Brielle went missing, the whole town looked for her. I’m sure it was the same for each of us.

I know. But I don’t look the same as I did before. I mean, with the mirrors, I stare at myself all day long in that room, and then I think about what I looked like before I came here and I don’t know if she’d even recognize me anymore. He took a knife and carved the word BULLY on my face. It’s there now forever and he made a gash, too, on my face. It’s big. I can’t get rid of it. I think I’d rather the room be dark, like yours is.

He cut the word BULLY into your FACE? He’s done a lot of other stuff to me, but he’s not cut me. Your mom would still recognize you, and want to see you. I just thought of something. So, in the room I’m in, it’s pitch black, but there’s a soundtrack that plays these terrifying ghost stories. I know ghosts aren’t real and stuff, but it’s really, really scary what happens in these stories. All of the stories are about light vanishing, and everybody dies in them. But you have constant light and mirrors that make you see what happened to your face. What if what he’s doing is personal, different for each of us?

Yeah, it seems like it might be. I know he’s looked through our socials and stuff. He’s definitely read every one of the articles I wrote for the paper. He thinks we caused River to kill himself. So, I guess, he’s, like, making each of our nightmares come real. He’s acting really weird lately too. He’s jumpy and a lot more mad. I can’t live like this forever. I do know that.

The letter in the gym is still in the same spot. I don’t think any of it’s been moved. So, I moved it. I was thinking, she probably goes for walks. Sierra probably don’t stay in the house. Nan said she likes the wooded trail that loops around the property. So, I went walking and there’s like a small wishing well. It’s dry, there’s no water; it’s more of a yard decoration. I put the note in the well. It’s not deep. Probably a long shot. Probably be rained on and ruined before anybody finds it. I was thinking about where to put one so that Brielle might find it. I don’t know what Brielle would do here. Sometimes she panics and, if she did that, I don’t think she’d leave the house. I pretended I was straightening it, and tucked a note behind the still life picture frame in the room. A corner of the note is barely visible, but I don’t think anyone will notice. Brielle might. I hope she does.

Have you figured out how to get the ankle bracelets off?

The problem is I don’t know how fancy these things are. I don’t think anybody really knows this but my dad’s in jail. One time, when I in middle school, he had to wear an ankle bracelet when he was on parole. He ditched his pretty easily, and fooled the cops for a little bit by putting the thing around our dog. Anyway, so I know some stuff about these things. Some of the fancy ones are temperature sensitive so, if you take it off, and it gets cooler than 98.6 degrees, it’ll go off. I don’t know if these have that or not. Some track your heartbeat. I don’t know if this one does that or not. So, I’m still thinking. I need a plan for what to do with it once we get it off before we ditch it. It’s hard to really look at it in the dark.

I heard something. I heard Jonathan talking, I don’t know who he was talking to, or if he was just talking to himself out loud, but he was in his office, and I walked by and heard him say, ‘It’s almost time.’ What do you think that means? Almost time for what?