Chapter 1 — Six Months of Fog

For six months I had believed I was losing my mind, and I had believed it because the person I trusted most in the world had spent those six months carefully teaching me to.

The signs had all pointed one way.

I was forgetting board meetings I’d scheduled myself.

Misplacing contracts worth more than most people earn in a lifetime.

Snapping at an executive team I’d spent a decade building, over nothing, and then not remembering I’d done it.

The whispers started in the break rooms and climbed floor by floor to the top of the tower. Adair is cracking.

Adair isn’t her grandfather. And the worst part, the part that still turns my stomach, is that I believed the whispers too.

I thought they were right.

I thought I was failing.

Chapter 2 — The Devoted Husband

Through all of it, Sennett was perfect.

My husband was attentive in a way that, looking back, was almost too fluent — the performance of a man who had rehearsed devotion until it looked like the real thing.

At the last quarterly review, my hands had shaken so badly I’d hidden them under the table.

Sennett had covered them with his own, warm and steady, and murmured to the board about how much stress I was under, how the weight of the family legacy was crushing me.

He said it with such tender, practiced sorrow that two of the directors actually teared up.

And every single morning, without fail, he brought me my espresso and my little blue anxiety pill — prescribed, he said, by a private concierge doctor he’d found for me, because he worried, because he loved me, because he only wanted me well.

Chapter 3 — The Imprint