Petra Farwell has everything except the ability to feel anything at all. Raised in privilege surrounded by a rotating cast of stepmothers, she has become a ghost in her own gilded life, drifting through luxury with inexplicable emotional distance. When her current stepmother Clare asks psychiatrist Lewis Pryne to analyze the girl, the doctor finds himself caught between two women: the beautiful Clare, who seems genuinely devoted to helping Petra, and the strange, unreachable patient herself, who begins to haunt his thoughts in ways that have nothing to do with medicine. As Lewis digs into Petra's past, he uncovers the ghost of a friend named Teresa, a loss that may explain everything about Petra's emotional withdrawal. The story shifts between Lewis's stark city office, where human suffering plays out in hard chairs, and Clare's gracious country estate, where green doors mark the threshold between surfaces and something more real. This is a novel about what happens when privilege fails to purchase happiness, and the dangerous territory between helping someone and wanting them for yourself.
