One company. Two promotions. Three fates.
It looks like the start of an ordinary story, the kind that happens every day in every office in the world. A multinational like so many others. People going to work, having lunch together, competing for a position, licking the wound of a defeat. Nothing that would seem to deserve a book.
Peter Vesper wakes at 4:45 every morning and has lived, for years, in a private autumn. The new opening describes him perfectly-except for two words at the bottom of the posting that he chooses not to read. Claire Vale likes to have everything ready before the deadline exists. Victor Lapsen isn't fast; he's ahead of everyone, and no one notices the difference. When a chair falls empty, three lives quietly become three candidacies-and a company that proudly speaks of inclusion and feedback begins to fail at exactly what those two words promise.
There is no villain in this novel. That's what makes it uncomfortable. Work relationships are, perhaps, the place where human beings reveal themselves most while believing they are hiding-and behind them lies a harder question: who each of us turns out to be at the exact moment we think no one is watching.
Always monitored. Never seen.