ports are closed

Leonard Miller nearly dies a dozen times completing every level of a mysterious game in closed beta. The moment he returns to the real world, the game goes live.On Earth, for everyone, whether they signed up or not. Dragged back in against his will, Leonard has one edge no other player does: he's already been through all of it. Armed with maxed-out attributes and complete knowledge of every trap and pattern, he tears through the stages, protects the people he loves, builds alliances, and slowly pieces together a chilling truth that a higher civilization has been using Earth as a playground. He intends to shut it down permanently.

Bryce Davidson married into the Barber family and has never quite stood straight under the weight of it. On New Year's Day, his wife Ginny leaves to collect relatives and asks him to bathe their infant with a towel. Out of some small, stubborn impulse he fills the bathtub instead. The phone rings. He looks away. By the time he looks back, it is too late. In his collapse he hides what happened. He conceals the baby,covers the room, holds himself together through the Barber family's New Year visit. Every attempt by the relatives to see the child Bryce deflects. Ginny watches him, and something in the way he moves begins to pull at her. She can feel the shape of a closed door. She moves toward it.

On her own wedding day, Jane Shaw sacrificed herself by taking the fall to save her in-laws and spent five years behind bars.When she walks free, she returns to find her husband’s childhood sweetheart, Wendy Wood, has slipped into her life like a cuckoo in a borrowed nest, adored by the very in-laws Jane once protected. Wendy plays the sweet, wounded innocent in public while weaving poison behind closed doors. But Jane didn’t survive five years as the prison’s top dog by being soft.Rather than strike hard and fast, she plays dumb, letting the scheming girl overreach, then springs a carefully laid trap that unravels every lie Wendy has ever told, right in front of the family. The question is whether she can reclaim what was always hers.