Some secrets are broadcast loud and clear. Others, you have to listen for in the dark.

Chicago journalist Emma Burleigh has a return ticket, no newsroom to go back to, and three weeks to sell the salt-bitten Gulf Coast house her estranged great-aunt left her. She isn’t staying. She has never stayed anywhere.

But the dead radio station on the property won’t stay quiet. At 2:59 each morning, it broadcasts through cut power lines—old songs, old dedications, all in her Aunt June’s voice.

As if a phantom broadcast weren’t enough to complicate a quick sale, the station’s co-owner is a problem on a completely different frequency. Noah Teague is a rugged, quiet fisherman with careful hands, a family ruined by hers, and a secret he’s kept since they were children: he remembers the summer girl she used to be. Bound by a co-signed deed, neither of them can sell or walk away without the other.

To decode what June is trying to say, Emma and Noah must open every archive both their families tried to seal. What they uncover is a mirrored history: a forbidden love written in song dedications, a fire that ended an era, and a crime the town’s silence has been compounding for seventy-seven years.

The dead can’t rest until someone says it out loud. Neither, it turns out, can the living.