Holloway

Survival taught her to keep everyone out. Love would ask the opposite. She was fifteen years old, eighty-nine pounds, homeless, starving, and had been in Los Angeles for six days when a stranger's hand closed around her arm. In 1999, a girl with no name, no shoes, and a stolen sandwich inside her jacket is picked up on Sunset Boulevard.

She has crossed a continent. She has been through the kind of hell that only the road can deliver. She has learned that silence is its own kind of wall, and that the only reliable thing in the world is herself.

Then a social worker named Renee slides into the back of a police cruiser, sits beside her - not across from her - and asks not where her parents are but when she last ate. It is the first time in a long time that Christine Holloway has been seen. That single decision by a single person does not save her.

But it shows her she is worth saving - and it plants the idea that will define her life: that the difference between a girl who disappears and a girl who survives is so often just one human being choosing, in one moment, to do something. Over the next three decades, Chris builds.

She studies the architecture of power from the ground up and turns a notebook of street-level observations into Holloway Group, a development firm that restores neighborhoods instead of hollowing them out. She becomes formidable, precise, untouchable - the Ice Queen behind glass. The walls that kept her alive at fifteen have made her a force by forty.

They have also kept everyone out. Then, a contractor named Danny Callahan walks into her office in work boots and refuses to be anything other than exactly who he appears to be, and Chris confronts the hardest project she has ever attempted: learning to let someone in.

When a man she once fired resurfaces with the money, the patience, and the corruption to dismantle everything she has built, she has to decide whether to face him the only way she knows how - alone - or to trust the people who have been s