Till Death Do Us Apart

The first thing Zara Whitmore asked Malcolm Ashcroft after eight years was not how he had been.
It was: Where's Adriana?
She said it before she could stop herself. She had been saying it, in one form or another, for most of her life.
Adriana Ashcroft manages the Ashcroft estate, plays piano like the room expects it, and has been watching Zara Whitmore from equestrian grounds since they were children. Zara is a first-year medical student with a forensic mind and a very specific problem: she has loved Adriana since before she had the vocabulary for it, and she has spent eight years pretending she hasn't.
Then Adriana dies.
And she doesn't leave.
What follows is a ghost story that is also a love story that is also a murder investigation - set in the gothic town of Stonemere, where the Ashcroft family has been dying in patterns for three generations, and where a ghost who is fading a little more each day refuses to disappear before Zara finds out why.
She kept the ring. She kept the diaries. She sat at 5:45 every day and waited.
She waited for a very long time.
f/f · sapphic · gothic · slow burn · ghost romance · mystery · literary fiction
⚠️ Content warnings: grief, death of a main character, loss of a parent, murder across generations, morally complex family dynamics. Full warnings in the first author's note.
Ranked #1 in the fxf category