The Grey Hour. The Unmaking, Book One, #1

Marren Vane knows what grief weighs. In the village of Fenmarrow, where the Guild's licensed chainsmiths never returned after the war, she has spent a decade pulling unbearable memories from soldiers, widows, and grieving parents and binding them into silver wire - steady, careful, illegal work that no one in Fenmarrow can afford to refuse and no one in the capital has bothered to notice. Then an Inspector comes east.
Beneath the village chapel, twelve years of buried war-grief is pressing against a dead man's failing seal, and the woman sent to investigate Fenmarrow's unlicensed smith is not leaving until she understands exactly what's been holding the village together. Marren's own sister wants a single unbearable night cut from her mind entirely. In a pasture past the last houses, something built from pain and bad wire has begun, very quietly, to feed.
Marren has always trusted her own hands over anyone else's - over the Guild that abandoned her village, over the law that would call what she does theft, over anyone who might tell her a wound needs to be shared to heal. Before winter ends, Fenmarrow will force her to learn what those hands can actually hold, and what slips loose the moment she closes them too tight. The Grey Hour is a story about the private economics of grief - what it costs to carry pain alone, and what it costs a community to let one person carry it for everyone - told through a hard, tactile magic system where memory is a physical thing that can be drawn out, weighed, and bound in silver.
Book One of The Unmaking.