What Cannot Be Taken Back

Three years after the accident that took his wife, John Reed has made himself very rich and very careful - a man who prices risk for a living and has trained his eyes never to drift toward a window. He has folded his grief small enough to keep standing up.

Then a physicist named Lina Chen offers him the one thing he has taught himself never to want: a door. Narrow, sealed, thirty stories beneath the Atlantic - and through it, a single irreversible loss might be reached, and undone.

But the gate keeps its own arithmetic. The price of taking a thing back is measured in everyone who would, in exchange, cease ever to have been. And the promise that sends John toward it was made on a bright afternoon, by a woman he can no longer ask what she meant.

What Cannot Be Taken Back is a luminous, devastating novel about grief, physics, and the impossible mathematics of choice - about the conversations that do not end so much as change who we have them with, and about what a person owes the dead when the one question that matters can never be asked again.