The False Child - LM Kaplin

The summer after seventh grade was supposed to be uneventful. Long days. Lazy afternoons. A derelict building on a hill, long forgotten.

But when a baseball sails over a rusted fence and into the grounds of the abandoned Fairfield Children's Home, curiosity pulls a group of friends toward a place the town has spent decades trying to forget. Yet something still lives beneath the cracked boards and tangled roots, something that remembers the children who never came home.

When a child goes missing, old wounds reopen, and the differences between what was lost and what returned becomes impossible to ignore. In Fairfield, not all children grow up. Some are taken. And some come back changed.