A CALEB MARLOWE SERIES SHORT STORY

Denver, 1882

Henry Jordan has ridden into the city with one purpose...to settle a score with N.J. Hawk, the newspaperman who slandered his name five years ago. But before he can find his target, a violent earthquake traps him in a newspaper’s cellar archive with a striking stranger — a woman fiercely guarding a box of old files and a secret far older than the rubble around them.

Trapped together in the dark as the city burns above, Henry and Josie Sinclair have no choice but to wait out the danger side by side. As they pass the time, Josie shares a story passed down through her family — of another earthquake, seven decades earlier, that shattered a California mission and buried the truth about what happened to the Acjachemen people who died there.

Hers is a story of erasure and survival, of who gets remembered and who doesn’t — and once Henry hears it, he realizes the ground isn’t the only thing capable of shifting beneath him.