In an alternate near-future New York known as Underland, recovering addict and EPA investigator Madewell Hatterson wakes inside the locked Treadwell Institute, an abbey-turned “wellness” retreat, missing the last three months of his life. Toxicology reveals he’s been dosed with Forget Me Not, a drug that permanently seals away a targeted span of memory. The staff, some more flirtatious than others, insist he checked himself in willingly, and the paperwork agrees. But the security footage does not: the hooded driver who delivered him has been digitally erased from every camera angle.

The Institute’s director, Dr. Finneas Brewer, offers an experimental path forward: memory-reconstruction sessions that might restore Madewell’s missing time before the window closes. As his memories return in disjointed, increasingly revealing fragments, they point to the murder of Underland’s magistrate, Earnest White, and to an environmental scandal tied to fracking sites and poisoned land. One recovered memory places Harry Marchforth Jr., the man Madewell may have been dating before the wipe, beside him at a fracking pad where the ground ruptures and something stirs beneath it. As more intimate memories surface, Madewell’s growing bond with Chip, the friendly young orderly, begins to complicate what the past seems to be telling him.

Outside the Institute, Maryanne Treadwell, White’s public girlfriend, begins her own search into what has been hidden around him, including the suspicious death of Underland’s regent, Queen Em. Once drawn to White’s promise of safety and status, Maryanne becomes increasingly aware of the rot beneath his public image. Her investigation into his inner circle, his political machinery, and the shadowy forces gathering around him soon points back toward both the Treadwell Institute and a deeper conspiracy shaping the country itself. The moment she takes evidence she was never meant to see, she becomes a liability to people far more dangerous than White alone.

Told in alternating viewpoints, the novel uses memory-recovery sessions and media artifacts—including journal entries, interviews, tabloids, and pharma ads—to reveal the truths Underland has worked to erase.