Some losses never heal. Some absences never stop searching.
Emily Parker thought she understood museums. Five years at the Met taught her everything about preserving artifacts and honoring history. But the Museum of Lost Treasures is different. Here, mundane objects—keys, rings, toys, photographs—are displayed like priceless relics. And when Emily touches them, she experiences something impossible: the exact moment each item was lost, flooded with the owner's raw grief and desperation.
The museum's enigmatic founder, Jonathan Hayes, claims every object retains an "emotional tether" to its owner. He's spent fourteen years gathering these pieces, building a concentrated archive of human loss. But Emily's arrival triggers something terrifying. Her psychometric sensitivity amplifies the connections, and the Retained Absences—manifestations of grief rendered in pure void—begin to wake.
These shadow-things drift through the galleries, searching for their lost objects. They pass through walls. They pull at reality. And they're drawn to Emily like moths to flame, sensing she can complete the circuits between object and owner, between loss and recovery.
As the museum's structure fails and the Absences converge, Emily must choose: help them reunite with what they've lost, potentially erasing people from existence—or destroy the collection and trap them in eternal searching.
