Proving

She went into the church with bread. For three hundred and eighty years, they said it was fire.

Nic Blackmore bakes through the night in a bakehouse off the square in Great Torrington, alone with the ovens and the orders and a message she opened in under a minute and has never answered. Her dad died in October after a fall nobody saw. Someone was blamed for it. Nic has let them be.

Then the builders open up an old oven in the bakehouse wall, and the nights change. Just after ten, the place smells of rain and burnt powder. Narrow footprints cross the floury lino to the yard. A loaf she never touched rises with two letters and an ear of wheat pressed into its crust. And from the yard, in the rain, a woman's voice calls a single name.

Kit.

In 1646, on a wet February night, Torrington church blew up with the prisoners inside it. A baker's widow had gone in that night to find her son. A frightened child told the soldiers what she had carried, and the town never forgot the story.

Now the child's descendant, eighty-eight and nobody's fool, has a folded paper in the family Bible that nobody has read aloud in three centuries. And Nic has until the anniversary to decide what she owes the dead, and the living.

A quiet, haunting novel of faith, grief and the truth we tell too late, from the author of Night Shift, Request Stop, Line Clear and Persons Reported.