Ask If the Interview Has Started

Ask If the Interview Has Started

Vera Ashworth has built her entire life around control.

Every evening, eleven million people watch her deliver the news with the calm, polished confidence of a woman who never loses her composure. Her hands don't shake. Her voice never falters. Her face gives away nothing she doesn't want the world to see.

Off camera, she is just as controlled.

She has a husband who loves her, a career people would kill for, and a life that looks, from the outside, almost perfect.

Almost.

Because Vera has a secret.

For years, she has been living with a private compulsion she has learned to hide with the same discipline she brings to the news desk. Anonymous encounters. Empty stairwells. Dark corners of parking structures. Moments stolen between broadcasts and then buried before anyone can ask where she has been.

She never learns names.

She never leaves evidence.

She never gets caught.

Until someone starts watching.

It begins with an eighteen-minute gap in a security log and a camera that mysteriously stopped recording at exactly the wrong time. Then comes an anonymous voicemail. Four strange words. A message that appears on her phone and refuses to make sense.

Ask if the interview has started.

Soon, Vera realizes someone knows.

And whoever it is isn't interested in exposing her all at once.

They are watching her panic.

As the threats become harder to dismiss, a security officer discovers footage that could destroy Vera's marriage and end the career she has spent fourteen years building. Then, during a live broadcast, a stranger sits across from her and says something that only one person in the world should understand.

Vera knows then that the secret she has spent years protecting is no longer hers alone.

With her husband beginning to notice the cracks, her career hanging in the balance, and an unknown person closing in around her, Vera has to decide what she is willing to lose to keep the truth hidden.

Her marriage.

Her career.

Her carefully constructed identity.

Or the life she has been living in secret.

Because eventually, every performance ends.

And this time, the audience is already watching.

Ask If the Interview Has Started is a tense, character-driven psychological suspense novel about secrecy, compulsion, intimacy, and the dangerous distance between the person we show the world and the person we become when nobody is supposed to be looking.