We talk about inheritance like it’s simple. A will. A bloodline. A name etched on a headstone.

But what about the quieter things—the silences we grow up inside, the grief no one mentions, the way certain stories never get told at all?

The Weight of Ash and Prayer began, for me, with a question: what happens to the parts of our history we never speak aloud? What do they become in the bodies of our daughters and granddaughters?

Sylvie Broussard isn’t trying to write a history book. She’s trying to understand the ache in her family’s bones—the kind that doesn’t show up in photographs, but in what’s missing from them. Her search for Clementine is less about discovery and more about reckoning: with silence, with survival, and with the emotional weight women carry quietly through time.

Clementine’s chapters aren’t a ghost story in the traditional sense, but they are haunted. Not by apparitions, but by absence. Her love, her losses, her choices—none of them were preserved by official memory. And yet, they persist. In the way the Broussard women hesitate before naming what they want. In the way they protect each other by withholding the truth. In the weight Sylvie feels without knowing why.

We inherit more than eye color or old jewelry. We inherit the silences our mothers kept. The stories they buried for protection. The grief they normalized. Sometimes we even inherit the love they weren’t allowed to claim.

The novel asks, in both timelines: what do we do with the emotional legacies we didn’t choose, but now carry? Can we rewrite them—or only witness them more clearly?

There’s a moment near the end when Sylvie finds an old tintype, a ring, and a kind of answer. Not the full story. Not a perfect resolution. But enough.

Enough to know that love, even when silenced, still leaves a trace.

 Enough to believe that healing begins with saying what was never said.

And sometimes, that’s the truest inheritance of all.