Eleven nights. One pumpkin. A man who forgets her every single morning. For fifteen years, Nell Barrow has cleared out the houses of the dead. Three boxes, three words: KEEP, GIVE, SELL: thirty seconds a room. She is very good at it, and she has never once kept anything for herself. Then a card turns up in a box she packs on the eighteenth of October. No numbers on it. No company. Only her own name, and a line on the back she does not stop to read. Two mornings later she wakes on a plank outside a small-town hardware store: inside a rind, unable to move, unable to close her eyes: while a quiet, grieving man turns her over in his hands, decides she will do, and carries her home to his kitchen table. The rules are simple and merciless. At sunrise she is a pumpkin. At sunset she is herself again, for eleven hours and not a minute longer. And every morning Gus Meade wakes with no memory that she was ever in his house. She cannot tell him what she is. Something closes around her throat each time she tries. She has until the thirty-first of October: the date circled twice on his kitchen calendar, the day he sharpens the knife and carves the pumpkin his mother carved every year of her life. Out in a scrap lot behind a warehouse there is a seed that has to break frozen ground before Halloween. And upstairs, in a room nobody has opened in seven months, there is a tin of seed packets a dead woman bought and never planted, kept for a reason she wrote down nowhere at all. Leave it. You never know. A quiet, slow-burn autumn romance about grief, small towns, and the difference between what you can let go of and what you keep.
