The Names She Kept

Mabel Corder has delivered every baby born on this stretch of Virginia mountain for a decade, her steady hands a lifeline when roads wash out and doctors never come. But in the autumn of 1918, she carries something home from a deathbed birth that no skill can outrun. As influenza tears through Laurel Fork, Mabel must fight for her own children — and reckon with an old grief she believed the mountain had already settled. A searing novel of motherhood, loss, and the stubborn act of beginning again.