Documenting the Widower

Nell Winterbourne records the lives of other people for a living, which is a polite way of saying she makes strangers narrate their worst years into a microphone and then goes home alone. Her new client, Corin Halloway, is eleven years widowed and wants the story on record — his wife's routine, her clothes, her disappearance into the west corridor of a house she was never seen to leave. Nell documents everything. She documents the groceries still delivered in the missing woman's name. She documents a fully plated dinner she is expected to eat, once, alone, in the wife's chair. She documents the previous interviewer whose tapes are ruined, and the way Halloway is not quite asking her to leave. Then she starts documenting forward: her own hours, her own keys, her own route home. A dark gothic stalker romance for readers who like their heroines to keep the receipts.