In this new novel of Gothic suspense from the author of The Daughters, a young American woman studying abroad in Paris is drawn into the orbit of an alluring aristocratic circle with long-buried secrets.

Elise, a twenty-year-old student and aspiring poet steeped in the works of Baudelaire and Buñuel, travels to Paris for a year abroad. When one of her poems is accepted by a literary journal, she meets its editor, the magnetic Charlotte de Reynaud, eldest daughter of a distinguished French family. Charlotte quickly takes Elise under her wing, ushering her into an elite social world—and introducing her to her enigmatic younger brother, Henri.

Elise and Henri fall into an intense, heady romance, marked by moonlit wanderings and a newfound closeness to upper-class life. But just as suddenly, Henri vanishes. Soon after, Elise is invited to spend Easter weekend at the de Reynaud family’s ancestral château in the south of France, a visit she hopes will reconnect her with him.

Yet beneath the family’s elegance and privilege lies something far more unsettling. As the weekend unfolds, Elise finds herself entangled in a web of long-guarded secrets that challenge her sense of reality, identity, and safety—altering the course of her life in ways she could never have imagined.