Every drop in this town is being watched. So is she.

Mara Colby reads water meters for a living, in a drought-scorched small town where a new state order has put every household's water use on public display ? a number on a placard, right out on the front lawn, for any neighbor to see. It's supposed to keep people honest. Then a routine complaint sends her to a dead woman's house on the one night that matters most, and the numbers on that meter tell a story nobody wants to hear: water running through the kitchen, long after the woman who lived there should have already been gone. With the state threatening to shut the town's water off completely in three days unless the compliance numbers finally add up, Mara starts pulling every thread the case will give her ? certain that if she just reads the numbers carefully enough, the truth has nowhere left to hide.

She's right. That's the problem.

Because someone in this town has access no honest technician should have ? and they're rewriting the record in real time, erasing what Mara finds faster than she can prove it was ever there. Every person she turns to for help turns out to have a reason of their own to slow her down. And the one person standing closest to the center of it all is the very man who taught her everything she knows about telling a true number from a lie.

So what do you do when the only person who ever taught you how to spot a lie... turns out to be the one who's been telling you one the whole time?