What if healing your grief meant giving your memories—and your child—to someone else?

When Ella loses her young son, she’s consumed by a grief so total it feels inescapable. Enter The Lifeboat, a clinic that promises to relieve unbearable suffering through revolutionary neural technology. Their method is simple—transfer your pain to a trained “surrogate,” who will process it for you, then return your mind healed and whole.

Sceptical but desperate, Ella signs away her agony. Her surrogate, Farah, is a professional, drilled in absorbing trauma without breaking. Yet some wounds cut deeper than science can measure. As Ella begins to feel peace, Farah starts to unravel—and both women find themselves tethered by something neither understands.

Set in a chillingly plausible near future, The Surrogate explores the cost of erasing pain, the ethics of empathy, and the dark places grief will drive us when love refuses to die. Ami Addax delivers a haunting, human story of loss, memory, and the fragile boundary between salvation and damnation.

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