The Gilded Ruin. The Gilded Ruin, #1

In a city where nothing goes wrong, Mara measures grief through amicable separations and quiet, acceptable loss. Her clients leave lighter. Their stories resolve. Every ending arrives exactly as it should. Then a man sits across from her and tells her his marriage has ended without cause, without conflict - without anything at all. Mara writes one word in her notes. Again. She does not remember writing it before.
The patterns begin to surface in small, precise fractures. Leaves fall too evenly. Conversations repeat with subtle variations. A fourteenth-century portrait in a gallery resembles a woman she cannot place - and cannot forget. Somewhere at the edge of her perception, a figure watches without intervening. Records adjust. Memories smooth. Events resolve themselves into something acceptable. The Gilded Ruin is a literary speculative novel about what begins to happen when a woman in a managed world starts to see what has been covered over, and the centuries-old figure whose continued position at a stone wall has, perhaps, been waiting for her to notice.
Book One of the Gilded Ruin Trilogy. For readers of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This Is How You Lose the Time War.