Alex Doyle wakes on an ordinary morning to find his daughter's bedroom turned into an office. His wife has never heard the name Cora. There is no birth certificate, no photograph, no grave. And yet Alex remembers her whole life, every scraped knee and bedtime argument, with a clarity that will not let him go.
He is a claims investigator. His whole job is proving what happened when the records say otherwise. So he does the only thing he knows how to do: he builds a case for a daughter the world insists never existed. Every lead erases itself as he touches it.
Then it happens again. A coworker. A neighbor. A town of nine thousand people, gone overnight, with only Alex left to know they were ever real. Someone far away is rewriting the world, one person at a time, and reality updates so completely that no one else can see the seams.
No one but Alex. And now the force doing the erasing has noticed that one man keeps remembering what he is supposed to forget, and it has started deleting everyone he loves to find out why.
To save them, Alex will have to uncover the one rule that keeps him in the world, and face what it says about him. The last copy of a life that was overwritten. The witness the future never counted on. The forgotten man.
For readers of Recursion and Dark Matter: a thriller that hides its own genre until you can no longer stop turning the pages.
