In Plain Sight - Paperback

The brain rehearses loss before it arrives. Elise Maren is the first person to prove it.

In the quiet of a university library, a year after her father's death, neuroscience PhD student Elise Maren finds something nobody has documented before: a faint secondary pattern in the sleep data of grieving subjects. A rhythm by which the brain prepares for losses it has not yet suffered. A small, persistent architecture beneath the noise.

Her discovery brings her to SOMNA, an elite research firm where her mentor has quietly arranged a place for her, her supervisor calls her work career-defining, and the company's guarded CEO takes a particular interest in what she has found. The science is real. The breakthrough is hers. And the further she chases the pattern, the more certain she becomes that something in the building was waiting for it.

When her best friend Demi volunteers for a public sleep study, the careful surface of SOMNA begins to crack. Behind it is a project older than Elise's career, run by someone who knew exactly which questions she would ask, and exactly how to put her in front of them.

In Plain Sight is a literary thriller about grief, science, and an institutional lie hidden in plain sight for seventeen years - and the researcher finally close enough to read it.