The Weight of His Attention

He could read everyone in the room. Everyone except himself.

Sam Whitfield is the kind of man who quietly organizes every room he finds himself in. Atlanta architect turned music industry road manager, disciplined to the minute, he reads people the way architects read buildings: the stress points, the load bearing walls, the part of each person that stays folded beneath the parts they expose. And he will tell you the truth about yourself before your second glass of wine. The people in his life call it a gift.

Sam calls it honesty. It has never once occurred to him that it just might be something else.

Then the life he built on control comes apart: a knock at the door, a cell, a courtroom, a therapist's chair. And a man who made a religion of paying attention is forced to turn it, at last, on the one person he spent his whole life refusing to see: himself.

This is a novel about the difference between being desired and being known, and the blind spots we build in childhood, then spend our adult lives calling our personality.

You will recognize someone in these pages. Maybe someone you love. Maybe yourself.