Eight years ago, Cheyenne Rubio walked out of Alex Becker’s life, seven months pregnant and ninety-five thousand dollars richer at his expense.

After failing to find her, Alex did what any emotionally immature adult would do: He gave up, buried himself in work, and spent the next decade constructing a world of shallow happiness.

Now thirty-five, Alex’s life looks impressive from the outside. He has a promising career, a collection of engaging distractions, and Juana, his esposa falsa—a marriage of convenience that’s turned out to be the most honest relationship in his life. Juana possesses a maddening ability to see right through him.

Then Cheyenne appears in the background of a Zoom call for work.

Determined to track her down, Alex finds himself pulled into a bizarre chain of events involving blackmail, fraudulent identities, and a daughter he’s never met. That chaos on top of falling in love with Juana is enough to implode his carefully maintained life.

The Fake Hedonist is a novel about adult late bloomers, self-inflicted loneliness, and the shallow lives we construct to avoid the risk of love.