Eleven months ago she had her love for her daughter surgically removed. She left herself a note explaining why. Maren Sollis performs the procedure. Eleven minutes, twice a week, for twenty years. It does not take the memories — it takes the weight, the part that makes you feel them. Her patients keep every fact about the person they have lost and lose the ache. Reversal is available for eighteen months, and after that it is not. She is very good at her job. She is calm, exact and entirely unremarkable. And one ordinary Tuesday, running an audit she expects to come back empty, she types her own name into the patient index. One record. Status: closed — procedure complete. The target was not her dead son. It was her living daughter. Sealed in the clinical file is an envelope in her own handwriting, left for a woman she cannot remember being. Inside are eighty-one pages about her daughter — eight years of surveillance, private pathology, an investigator's report she paid for and did not like the answer to — and a note nine lines long. The first line says DO NOT UNDO THIS. The woman who wrote that note knew things Maren no longer knows. She had eight years in that house. She was not mad and she was not grieving badly, and she went to considerable trouble to make sure she could not be argued with. Maren has twenty-two weeks to decide whether to believe herself — and every week she spends deciding is a week she cannot get back. A novel about the difference between loving someone and being unable to leave them alone, and about what a person will pay to become someone she can stand to be. For readers who like their suspense quiet, their narrators unreliable and their endings earned.
