The Salt Wife

She wakes in a cold room to salt air and gulls — and the certainty that someone is sitting beside the bed, very still, watching her sleep. She keeps her eyes shut. She is, she understands without knowing why, already very good at being asleep while awake. She is married to Julian Thorne, of the great grey house above the sea — a house whose portraits climb the stairwell, generations of confident men and the closed, careful women beside them. On this coast, when a wife disappears into the water, they have an old name for her: a salt wife. And the more she pieces together of her own missing days, the more she understands the pattern she has married into — and how far back it goes. Told in alternating Now and Then, The Salt Wife is a slow-burn gothic psychological thriller about marriage, memory, and the women a house eats — perfect for readers of Rebecca-style modern gothic suspense.