Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Child They Hid

The Child They Hid

Carpenter, Laura

Paperback

General Fiction

ISBN13: 9798279248063
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Dec 21 2025
Pages: 430
Weight: 1.14
Height: 1.07 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Niamh Keegan comes home to the west of Ireland in the teeth of winter-rain slanting like judgement, hedgerows dark with secrets, and the iron gates of her father's estate waiting exactly as they always have: polished, imposing, and quietly accusing. Her father is dead. The house is already full-neighbours, condolences, whispered assessments dressed up as sympathy. Grief here isn't private. It's a ritual. A performance. A reckoning. Niamh arrives in black, Oxford-polished and painfully controlled, determined to get through the wake, the funeral, the obligations... and get back to the life she built far from this place. Then she sees him. Ciarán Doyle-once her first love, once her certainty, now a man carved sharper by time and loss. He's at the heart of the house as if he never left it, hands steady, voice clipped, eyes still impossible to forget-one blue, one green. He doesn't greet her with warmth. He doesn't offer the comfort she hasn't earned. He simply watches her, like he's been waiting for her to finally look at what she ran from. Niamh tries to focus on the practical things: tea in the kitchen, faces she half remembers, the parlour where her father lies in a coffin as immaculate as his rules. But the estate has changed in ways no one will name. There are child-sized boots by the door. A crayon drawing on the fridge. Laughter in the hallway-bright, fearless, alive. And then the girl appears. Millie. Mud on her trousers, a riding helmet skewed, too much confidence for a house full of mourning. She calls Siobhán Mam without hesitation. She speaks with the blunt honesty only children can afford. And when she looks up at Ciarán and grins, the truth lands with a sickening clarity Niamh can't breathe through: Those eyes. That mark. That impossible familiarity. Years ago, Niamh was told her baby didn't survive. Stillborn, they said. Gone before she could even hold her. But the dead don't laugh in the kitchen. The living do. As Niamh pushes against the walls her father built-walls of influence, silence, and carefully managed stories-she begins to understand what it really cost to protect a reputation in a town that remembers everything. The more she demands answers, the more dangerous the truth becomes, not just for her, but for the child at the centre of it all. And Ciarán-furious, loyal, stubbornly present-holds his own grief like iron, refusing to let Niamh turn Millie into a mystery to solve instead of a person to love. Because he knows what happened. He's known pieces of it for years. And he's been living with the consequences in ways Niamh never had to see. Now, in a house where everyone is watching and the past refuses to stay buried, Niamh must choose: protect the lie that kept her safe... or fight for the truth that could finally set them all free. A raw, cinematic story of love and betrayal, motherhood and power, and the brutal intimacy of coming home-when home has been keeping your child from you.

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Carpenter, Laura

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General Fiction

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