Fates fracture beneath the glare of a modernist monument in this lacerating literary drama and sly social satire. After her partner replaces their shared calendar photo with a farewell and moves out, forty-one-year-old Mara Ellison, an unemployed cultural journalist, accepts an improbable offer from Gabriel Voss, a venture philanthropist she ghosted fifteen years ago: help him rehabilitate Solarium, his famous glass house on the Hudson, by converting it into a residency for thinkers and makers. If Mara can make Solarium stand for conscience rather than scandal, she might resurrect her career; Gabriel might rinse his legacy clean.
Missing from Solarium is Soren Vale, a mercurial sound artist whose murmuration recordings turned listeners into pilgrims, and whose sudden disappearance left behind a looped hum in the vents, a dented contact mic in the pantry, and a single scratched line on the window washer's pulley. With nineteen-year-old Jun Park, an architecture student and one of Soren's most devoted followers, Mara builds a season of public salons and tightly edited streams that lean on the mythology of Soren's last piece, manipulating the house's tinting smart glass, its drone footage, and its always-on archive. Too bad Gabriel forbids them from asking the only question that matters: where Soren went, and why the house keeps misdating its own reflection.
As Jun maps pockets of cold air and errant echoes through Solarium's unseen service corridors, and Mara is drawn into fraught intimacies with both Gabriel and Nico Larios, the taciturn window cleaner who was last to see Soren alive, the pair uncover an opaque chamber embedded in the heart of the transparent home, a black-glass cube engineered to erase someone in plain sight. The revelation detonates a chain of NDAs, betrayals, and performances that make truth indistinguishable from rehearsal. You think you are living inside the glass house; perhaps it has been living inside you all along.
