Nora Vale has spent five years being the perfect wife. The right smile. The right dress. The right level of gratitude for a life she didn't quite choose but learned to inhabit so completely she nearly forgot it wasn't hers.
When Daniel books a surprise trip to a sun-drenched resort on the Algarve coast to celebrate their anniversary, she tells herself this is it. The proof she's been waiting for. Real.
Then, on the first night, he vanishes.
The shower runs for forty-seven minutes. The bathroom window is unlatched from the inside. The passport is still in the safe. And the detective who arrives - unhurried, inevitable, as if he knew this would happen - asks questions that feel less like investigation and more like performance.
As the week unravels, Nora begins to understand that nothing about this resort, this marriage, or this disappearance is what it appears to be. That someone has been watching her. That the key she's been carrying in her wallet for five years - the key she received from a man in Porto and never thought to question - is the reason for all of it.
She has been managed. Contained. Used as a piece in a game she wasn't told was being played.
>Perfect for fans of The Housemaid and Gone Girl - a psychological thriller of sun, secrets, and the marriage that was never what it seemed.