Goodreads asked Skye Arden:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Skye Arden There’s a family photograph that’s always unsettled me—faded at the edges, taken before I was born. Everyone is smiling, but one figure stands apart. A man no one talks about. His name is written on the back in a looping script I don’t recognize, and every time I’ve asked about him, the subject gets quietly changed or met with a vague “Oh, he moved away.” Except… I found the same handwriting in a box of letters my grandmother kept hidden under her bed. Letters full of apologies, fragments of regret, and one cryptic line: “What we buried wasn’t the whole story.”

That mystery—the man who vanished from the family narrative—could easily become the seed of a novel. A woman digging into her family’s past, only to discover that the story she grew up believing was a carefully constructed lie. It’s not just about uncovering what happened to him—but why everyone needed to forget.

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