When Mrs. De Peyster prepares for a trip abroad, she does so with the calm composure expected of a woman of her station. But behind the polite conversation with her cousin Olivetta and secretary Miss Gardner, something is crumbling: her son Jack has vanished, and no one knows whether he's alive, dead, or simply gone. The mystery of the missing heir unfolds against the gilded backdrop of early twentieth-century Manhattan, where a mother's anxiety must be hidden beneath layers of social expectation and performative grace. As reporters circle and family secrets surface, Scott dismantles the brittle architecture of upper-class respectability with sharp, humane wit. This is a novel about what happens when the mask slips and the world sees not a matriarch, but a frightened woman. It endures because it captures something timeless: the terror behind polite faces, and the desperate performances we call composure.
