The heat of July had barely brushed the rooftops of the old town when Maria Kazi Sadie stepped off the rust‑painted bus and onto the cracked cobblestones of her grandmother’s village. She had not been back in fifteen years—not since the summer when she was fourteen, when a sudden storm had ripped the old oak from the square and taken with it the secret place she and her friends called the Hollow . Now, at twenty‑nine, she carried with her a small suitcase, a notebook full of half‑finished poems, and a promise she had whispered to herself the night before she left the city: this summer will be new.