The Rose Beneath The Ice

"Your father killed my father."
She was eleven when he said it. He never took it back.
Rosalie Irving grew up under the Carmichael roof as a debt she could never fully repay, raised out of guilt, mocked at every dinner table, and made to understand, again and again, that she would never truly belong. Not a sister. Not a Carmichael. Just the daughter of the man they say killed his father.
Now grown, she still calls him Mr. Carmichael. Still lowers her eyes when his find her across a room. Still tells herself the past is settled.
It isn't.
A stranger's phone call. A house she hasn't seen in thirteen years. A truth someone has spent a decade making sure stays buried, and a man who was never as indifferent to her as he wanted the world to believe.
A dark, slow-burn romance of buried secrets, forbidden longing, and a hatred that was never quite what it looked like.