Credence

Seventeen-year-old Tiernan de Haas stands in her parents' house while paramedics wheel out two bodies.

Seventeen-year-old Tiernan de Haas stands in her parents' house while paramedics wheel out two bodies. Her father, a famous film producer, had terminal cancer. Her mother, an Oscar-nominated actress, chose not to let him leave without her. They dressed in their finest clothes, put the dog outside, and died in each other's arms sometime around two in the morning. They didn't leave their daughter a note—not a line, not a word. Mirai, her mother's devoted assistant, walks outside with shears and saws through the rope of the tire swing her father once pushed her mother on during their private, magical nights. The tire drops to the ground. A single tear falls down Tiernan's cheek—the first proof in years that someone in this world loves her.

An orphan's only relative offers a mountain hideaway in Colorado

That night, Tiernan's private phone rings with a Colorado area code. Jake Van der Berg—her father's estranged step-brother—introduces himself as her newly appointed guardian, news to him as much as to her. He describes his life on a mountain outside Chapel Peak: two grown sons, a custom motorcycle business, no cable, and winters that bury the roads for months. He offers her a choice—emancipate herself or come live with strangers. When he asks if she's had a good life, she can't answer. Everything she owns is expensive and meaningless. Her parents' bedroom door looms at the end of the hall like an accusation. She says yes to Colorado, trading a mansion of silence for a stranger's promise of wind, waterfalls, and thunder.

Candy shops and deer carcasses introduce a world nothing prepared her for

Jake meets her at the tiny airport, hauling Louis Vuitton luggage into a battered truck. The drive takes them through Chapel Peak—a general store with six aisles, a candy shop called Rebel's Pebbles where Jake makes her fill a bag of sweets—then twenty minutes up a dirt road into dense forest. The house surprises her: three floors, massive windows, real fireplaces. Jake's younger son Noah greets her with a beer instead of a handshake, all cocky blue eyes and a backward baseball cap. A dead buck hangs bleeding in the garage. Jake explains they grow, catch, and kill their own food. Tiernan's bedroom opens to a view of the granite peak—a cathedral she reaches for with her bare hand. But the older son, Kaleb, is somewhere deep in the woods and hasn't been seen in weeks.