The clock at Hollow Creek station has been four minutes slow for as long as anyone can remember. Nobody resets it. Nobody says why. On a foggy autumn night, thirteen-year-old Theo Ashby chases a runaway beagle to the edge of town and finds people waiting on a platform where nothing is due. When a train comes down the second rail — quiet, golden, older than memory — he does what no one is ever told to do, and what everyone somehow does. He gets on. Aboard, Theo finds a conductor who has been punching tickets for more than a century, a dining car with a place already laid in his name, and three rules that must never be broken. Don't go into the last carriage. Don't step down onto a platform unless the conductor says your name first. Don't answer your own name, whoever's voice is saying it. The fourth warning doesn't come from the conductor. It comes from an old woman in a good coat, quietly, the way you'd tell someone there was a wasp on their shoulder: whatever you do, don't count. Because the train is looking for something it lost in the winter of 1901. It has been counting ever since. And Theo's father, who vanished three years ago, may know exactly what number it's waiting for. A winter tale for anyone who has ever stood on an empty platform a little longer than they needed to — A Midnight Train is a haunting, warm-hearted supernatural mystery about grief, courage, and the lamps we keep lit for the people we're waiting on.