Your Name, My Secret
Working Title: Palinode The Hook: When a grief auditor begins rewriting the emotional histories of strangers, she realizes someone has already rewritten hers. The Blurb: The North Sea eats sound. Inside an offshore....
Working Title: Palinode The Hook: When a grief auditor begins rewriting the emotional histories of strangers, she realizes someone has already rewritten hers. The Blurb: The North Sea eats sound. Inside an offshore bereavement facility commissioned by failing insurance firms, Elowen Price audits grief—literally. Clients arrive to “reconcile” their emotional records with financial claims, their testimonies transcribed, scored, and sometimes… corrected. Elowen’s method is infamous: she doesn’t interview, she inhabits. By mimicking speech patterns, posture, even micro-habits, she becomes a temporary double—an embodied ledger that draws out contradictions. It’s clinical. It’s controlled. It’s the only way she knows how to exist without feeling anything of her own. When a file marked E. Price appears in the system—authorized by someone named Arthur Keane, the facility’s unseen founder—Elowen assumes it’s a clerical echo. But the transcripts detail a version of her life she doesn’t remember: a sister she never had, a debt she never paid, a moment of negligence tied to a maritime disaster quietly buried by insurers. As storms cut the platform off from the mainland, Elowen is assigned to audit the case—herself—while her colleagues begin treating her as if the alternate history is fact. Only Rhys Calder, a maintenance diver with sealed disciplinary records, refuses to acknowledge the shift, though his motives feel less like loyalty and more like surveillance. The deeper Elowen performs this other self, the more the facility responds—doors opening to her, systems granting access, voices on archived tapes addressing her by a different name. She uncovers a systemic operation: grief isn’t reconciled here, it’s engineered, rewritten to minimize payouts. Identities are malleable assets. And hers has been pre-edited for a purpose she cannot see. The final fracture comes when Elowen realizes Arthur Keane doesn’t exist as a person but as a role—one she has already been fulfilling. The question is no longer whether she’s being manipulated, but whether she authored the manipulation and erased it. To expose the system, she must destroy the only version of herself that still feels real—or accept a rewritten past that grants her control over everyone else’s truth.