The Giving Side: A Novel of Blood, Debt, and the Heart (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798248651214)

Haileigh Kearney has built her life on order, logic, and the belief that everything can be explained. But when her grandmother dies, she discovers something that defies reason-a gold coin hidden beneath the body's tongue. No one in her family will speak of it. No one will admit it exists.

Until she learns it has always been there.

For generations, every Kearney has died with the same coin-each one larger than the last. As Haileigh begins to unravel her family's history, she uncovers a desperate bargain made during the Irish famine: survival in exchange for something far more intimate than blood. A piece of the heart, taken at death. A debt that has been quietly collected for two centuries.

The coin is not a symbol. It is a receipt.

As the truth emerges, so does the presence behind it-an ancient, patient force known only as the Giving Side. It does not hunt. It does not deceive. It offers. And it always collects.

Determined to end the cycle, Haileigh does the unthinkable-taking the entire debt into herself to stop the harvest once and for all. But breaking the bargain comes at a cost. The prosperity that protected her family collapses overnight. Misfortune floods in. And inside her chest, something ancient begins to stir-not with hunger, but with awareness.

Now Haileigh must live with what she has become: the final vessel of a centuries-old exchange, holding the line between survival and consumption. Because the Giving Side is still there. Still waiting.

And if she falters-even once-the taking will begin again.

THE GIVING SIDE is a literary dark fantasy novel about faerie bargains, generational debt, and the cost of survival in a world where prosperity is never free. For readers of Annihilation, The Only Good Indians, and Mexican Gothic.