The Nameless Tide

A woman who restores the dead is about to find out that the dead have been waiting eleven years for her to say their names out loud.
Delphine Ash is the best photograph conservator in Boston, which means she is very good at one thing: stopping things from falling apart.

For eleven years Delphine has not been able to remember the year she turned eighteen. Not the night. Not the light. Not the man who pulled her out of the water and whose name she has carried in her body ever since without knowing where she got it. She has built an entire adult life on top of that hole and called it strength.
Then a face goes out of a photograph while she is watching it. Not damaged. Not faded. Smoothed — the way a thumb smooths a coin. And a letter comes from the island she ran from at eighteen, in the hand of her father, who has not spoken since.
Cairnhollow is three square kilometres of granite in Penobscot Bay. Six hundred people. Nine chairs in a round room at the top of a lighthouse, and five of them are empty. And a burial shroud with three thousand names stitched into its hem in lampblack and brine.
For three hundred and fourteen years this island has kept its dead the only way that has ever worked: by saying their names out loud, in a room, in front of somebody else. A name spoken by two people cannot be taken.
A name spoken by one person buys about four seconds.
The flame went out eleven years ago and nobody told her. Cairnhollow has been running on the memory of a fire ever since — the way a house stays warm for an hour after the furnace dies — and the hour is almost up.
What is waiting for her on the rock:
A father in a wooden chair facing the water who has not spoken in eleven years, and who is the only person alive permitted to fill the five empty chairs.
A harbour diver with a half-moon scar in his palm that she recognises without ever having been told, who has said her name out loud at six oclock in the morning in the fog every day for eleven years, and whom she cannot hold in her head for more than eleven seconds at a time. He is the best hand with a boat in the county. He has taken a vow. And he will not sail her out to the island where the shroud is hidden.
A company with ninety-one million users that has already bought sixty-one houses on the north end and wants to build "a permanent home for human memory." And its founder — who is not a villain. He is a kind man who lost a daughter and built something terrible out of grief, courtesy and forty-one billion dollars. That is so much worse.
And ten days.
Ten days before the town votes to sell itself. Ten days before a survey vessel with a federal regulation parks itself in the passage. Ten days to get nine people into a room, a boat through two rocks that grind shut, and three thousand names home.
She has four names, five blanks, a rusted key out of a coffee tin, and one advantage nobody else on that island has: she is a conservator. She knows what you do with a thing that is falling apart. You say it until you cant say it any more, and you write down the date.
Because keeping is not free. For every name spoken before the flame, something of the speaker is taken, and the flame does the choosing. By the time this is over Delphine will have paid for three thousand names with pieces of herself she will never see again — and she will not once stop to look at the price.
The Nameless Tide is Book One of The Keeping, a contemporary fantasy series set on the coast of Maine in the present day. Slow burn. Closed door. No sexual content — every ounce of the heat is in memory and salt and voice and proximity.
Tropes: slow burn · forced proximity · he fell first and cannot remember it · amnesia · small town with a terrible secret · a villain you will agree with · ticking clock · closed door