Chapter 1

Oakhaven, Vermont, was a town that clung to its secrets like the morning mist clung to the valleys, it was small, isolated, and the kind of place where everyone knew your name and your mother' s maiden name too.

My name is Sarah, and my mother, Martha, was born deaf and mute, a silence that wrapped around her like a shroud.

The old folks said a wise woman, a folk healer, had been there at Mom' s birth.

She' d looked at newborn Martha and proclaimed she would speak only three times in her life.

Each time, her words would carry immense weight, like stones dropped into a still pond, the ripples spreading far and wide.

For years, that prophecy was just a story, a piece of Oakhaven lore whispered at town gatherings, something to make my mother seem even more of an enigma than her silence already did.

She never spoke, not a word, not a sound, communicating through a series of gestures and expressions only I and my father, Tom, truly understood.

Dad was the lumber mill foreman, a man whose hands were rough but whose heart was gentle, especially when it came to Mom.

He loved her with a quiet intensity that filled our small farmhouse.

Then there was Michael, my fiancé, a teacher at the local school, his support a steady anchor in my often-unsettled life.

Sheriff Brody was the law in Oakhaven, seen it all, heard it all, and mostly tired of it all.

And Pastor Elias Thorne, he led the town's dominant church, his voice smooth as river stones but his influence heavy, shaping opinions and quieting dissent.

"Simple" Jack, as the town called him, wandered Oakhaven, his words a jumble that sometimes, just sometimes, held a sliver of truth nobody else dared to voice, he was harmless, mostly ignored, but he saw things.

This was my world, built on silence, love, and an old, waiting prophecy.