The Sea of Memories. The Gilded Ruin, #2

The system did not break. The system improved. Mara has returned. The sessions resume. The clients arrive with their calibrated grief and she receives it with the precision she has always brought to this work. The notebook is on the desk. The pen is beside it. The room is exactly as she left it. But the figure at the edge of her vision is still there. And the portrait at the Sable Gallery - the woman who is not quite Mara and not quite not - has been moved to a room she was not shown on her first visit.
The Sea of Memories is the second book in the Gilded Ruin Trilogy - a literary speculative novel about what it costs to return to a life that has learned to continue without you, and the question of whether the version of yourself that stayed was ever really you. For readers of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun.