Don’t look away.

They live in the corners of your vision — the dead air of a parking garage at three in the morning, the edge of a crowded platform, the unwatched dark of your own hallway. They feed on the moments you look away. When they take someone, they don’t leave a body. They leave nothing at all. The taken are erased from every memory at once, unmade so completely that no one is left to miss them.

Tim Reese has spent forty-nine years getting very good at not looking. A night-shift security guard, divorced, estranged from the daughter who gave up on him long ago, he has made disappearing into a quiet art — until the night his only friend vanishes from a room Tim was watching, and Tim is the last person alive who remembers he was ever real.

What he stumbles into is a hidden war fought with the one weapon the things in the dark cannot endure: an unflinching, believing gaze. And the city is running out of people willing to hold it. To stand against what’s coming, a man who has spent his whole life unseen will have to learn to look — and to let himself be looked at — before the dark swallows everything, and everyone, he never let himself love.

Some things only exist as long as someone is willing to see them. So is love. So are we.