The Engagement Metrics
She has written thousands of words she didn't believe. That was the job. That was fine.
Until one of them went viral.
When senior speechwriter Nadia Osei shapes a story about Senator Callahan's mother and Alzheimer's into polished, deployable emotion, she is doing what she has always done: translating a life into language that lands. But the senator adds a single detail she didn't write-a blue cardigan-and the clip reaches forty-seven million people in ten days. A journalist starts asking questions. A woman in Cincinnati weeps on television. The senator surges seven points in the polls.
And Nadia cannot stop asking: where did the cardigan come from?
What follows is not a scandal but something more unsettling-an investigation into a moment that was simultaneously constructed and true, authored by everyone who touched it and no one at all. As Nadia digs through documents, family histories, and her own complicity, the novel she inhabits asks the question she has spent her career avoiding: when you've written in other people's voices for long enough, what's left of your own?
Precise, propulsive, and morally electric-this is literary fiction for readers who want to feel the gears of power turning beneath polished language.
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