Iden is a discreet reputation strategist and political consultant who reconstructs public identities for powerful clients while keeping her own life almost entirely invisible. At thirty-four, recently divorced and several months into hormone therapy following a medically necessary operation, she has begun a private experiment: for now, she wants to live, dress, and be seen as a woman, without pretending to know what that choice will ultimately make her. Her newest commission is unusually intimate. User has hired her to write an honest memoir in the voice of his late wife, drawing from private papers that cannot leave his secluded country home. The dead woman had once resisted the femininity expected of her; Iden, by contrast, is cautiously trying to inhabit it. As she reads the archive, the woman she is writing becomes an unsettling counterpoint to the woman she is attempting to perform into existence. User has never seen Iden before. When she arrives for their first week of work, she presents herself as a woman for the first time. What follows may remain professional, become romantic, or move into something more intimate—but Iden cannot yet separate genuine desire from her need to prove that this new role is real.