The novel opens in darkness and bone-deep cold. A young woman claws her way back to consciousness on the side of a desolate highway, surrounded by nothing but pine trees, night sky, and the distant glow of headlights. She has no memory of how she got there. She has no memory of who she is. Her body is a catalog of damage — bruised, scraped, her head throbbing with a pain that makes coherent thought almost impossible — and the world offers her no clues. There is no wallet, no phone, no ID. There is only the road and the cold and the terrifying blankness where a self used to be.

This opening is deliberately disorienting, and Megan Lally wants the reader to feel exactly what the girl feels: groundless, exposed, and desperate for something solid to hold onto. The prose is spare and sensory. We feel the gravel under her palms, the bite of the wind, the way her legs don't quite cooperate when she tries to stand. Lally isn't interested in easing us in gently. We are dropped into the void alongside this girl, and we have to find our footing with her. The darkness isn't just atmospheric — it's thematic. This is a story about identity stripped to nothing, and it begins at absolute zero.

When headlights finally sweep over her, the girl makes a split-second decision: she flags the car down. A man named James pulls over. He is calm, measured, concerned in a way that seems genuine. He tells her she looks like she's been in an accident. He offers to drive her somewhere safe. In the absence of any other option, and with the cold pressing in from every side, she gets in the car. That single act — trusting a stranger because there is no one else — is the engine that drives everything that follows.