Something is being handed over, and almost no one has noticed.
It is 2026 in Berkeley, and the machines have quietly taken over the work of thinking. A colleague's best idea came from a chatbot and she cannot tell the difference. A young woman at the next table is in love...

In June 2021, Arthur Holm, a forty-four-year-old psychiatrist with a practice in Marin County and a marriage that ended quietly years before, walks away from his life and sits down on a bench in Berkeley's Civic Center. He does not lose his mind. He does not hit bottom. He chooses.

Eli Kaplan is seventy-two years old, living alone in a duplex in St. Paul, and he has just published a novel that knows something it shouldn't.
Told in reverse, from the quiet discipline of old age back through the collapse of a marriage, a breakdown that left doctors with no explanation...