Benjamin Rask is orphaned at eighteen, inherits his father's fortune, and discovers for the first time a passion for investing.

Rask fires his long-serving money manager, launches his own Wall Street trading operation, and quickly earns a reputation as an investing genius.

Catherine Brevoort engineers a private introduction between Rask and her daughter Helen at a gala held in Rask's Fifth Avenue mansion.

Helen agrees to marry Rask, recognizing that despite her mother's scheming, the marriage offers a freedom her parents never gave her.

Rask liquidates his holdings and shorts the stock market, profiting immensely as the crash devastates the country and deepens the Depression.

Helen's mental health collapses completely; Rask discovers her locked in her room, bleeding from incessant scratching and covered in eczema.

Rask fires Dr. Frahm and places Helen under Dr. Aftus, who performs experimental chemical convulsive therapy on her against her will.

The third chemical convulsive treatment kills Helen, leaving her body twisted in pain with a collarbone broken by the induced convulsions.

Bevel's autobiography presents him as a fourth-generation patriotic financier whose investments guided America through successive economic crises.

Bevel portrays his wife Mildred as a gentle, childlike homemaker who loved domesticity and inspired his financial work as a quiet muse.

Bevel hires Ida Partenza as ghostwriter after she impresses him by comparing his Wall Street offices to money's high temple.

Bevel reveals he has bought Vanner's publisher to trap the author in his contract and pulp all future copies of Bonds.

Partenza sneaks into Mildred's private rooms and discovers heavily annotated books in multiple languages, revealing a deeply intellectual and secretive woman.

Partenza finds Mildred's journal titled Futures in the final box of personal papers at the converted Bevel mansion museum and steals it.

Mildred's journal reveals she, not Bevel, was the true investment mastermind behind his greatest and most celebrated financial coup.

The novel opens with Benjamin Rask, an orphaned heir who discovers a singular obsession with investing and rises to become the most powerful financier on Wall Street. Through strategic matchmaking, Rask marries Helen Brevoort, and together they navigate a passionless but functional life until Rask's short on the 1929 market makes him a pariah in society. Helen's mental collapse sets off a tragic chain of events in which Rask's need for control overrides her recovery and ultimately kills her. The narrative then reveals itself to be a fiction within a fiction, as Andrew Bevel hires ghostwriter Ida Partenza to craft an autobiography countering the unflattering portrait of him and his wife Mildred. Bevel systematically erases competing narratives and fabricates a version of Mildred as a gentle homemaker, but Partenza's discovery of Mildred's private journal exposes the full scope of his deception. The journal reveals that Mildred, not Bevel, was the true investment mastermind whose strategy built his entire legend.

The headline story of wealth, deception, and the true architect of financial genius.

Leopold Brevoort begins tutoring his five-year-old daughter Helen across wide-ranging subjects, creating the happiest years of her childhood.

Leopold becomes obsessed with Swedenborg's theology and forces nine-year-old Helen to abandon her studies for his esoteric curriculum.

Leopold's mind deteriorates in Europe and Catherine commits him to a Swiss psychiatric hospital, leaving the teenage Helen alone in Zurich.

Helen meets Sheldon Lloyd in Zurich, who courts her primarily for the social prestige of her family name.

Helen and Rask develop a genuine bond through private chamber music recitals and their shared interest in psychiatric research.

Helen throws herself into organizing economic relief efforts for those devastated by the crash, racked with guilt over Rask's role.

Helen locks herself in her room and sends a note to her mother directing her to take Helen to the Medico-Mechanic Institute in Switzerland.

Dr. Frahm's unconventional holistic treatment of physical exercise, talk therapy, and journaling significantly improves Helen's condition at the Swiss hospital.

Rask returns to New York after Helen's death and discovers his life as a widower is virtually unchanged from his years as a bachelor.

Bevel describes meeting and marrying Mildred Howland, portraying her as his soulmate and the warm emotional center of their household.

Partenza applies for a secretarial position at Bevel's offices and joins hundreds of other candidates waiting in a line stretching around the block.

Partenza writes a brief autobiography for Bevel's hiring process, strategically mixing fact and fiction to match what she thinks is expected.

Partenza reads autobiographies of Franklin, Carnegie, Roosevelt, and Ford to assemble a composite voice for Bevel's ghostwritten memoir.

Mildred invests money Bevel gives her for philanthropy and dramatically outperforms his own returns, prompting him to try and fail to replicate her strategy.

Mildred continues directing Bevel's investment strategy from her deathbed at the Swiss hospital, never receiving any public credit for her work.

Helen Brevoort's childhood is shaped by a gifted father whose intellectual mentorship gives way to a suffocating obsession, leaving her withdrawn and desperate for freedom. She eventually escapes into marriage with Rask, where she finds her own voice through philanthropy, arts patronage, and a rare bond with her husband over music and psychiatric research. The crash of 1929 destroys her social world and accelerates her mental breakdown, sending her to a Swiss hospital where treatment briefly helps before Rask's interference proves fatal. Meanwhile, Ida Partenza's story runs in parallel, as she navigates poverty, a domineering father, and a manipulative employer to forge her own path as a writer. The competing autobiographical accounts of Bevel and Partenza are eventually answered by Mildred's own voice in her journal, which shows her as the silent engine of their financial empire. Through these secondary threads, the novel builds its argument that the most important stories belong to those with the least power to tell them.

The hidden lives and quiet sacrifices behind the Rask and Bevel story.

Rask capitalizes on the financial panic of 1907, multiplying his fortune and becoming increasingly reclusive as his Wall Street reputation grows.

The Brevoorts flee their collapsed fortune to Europe, where Catherine exploits Helen's prodigious memory as entertainment at fashionable parties.

After learning her father Leopold vanished from the Swiss hospital, a devastated Helen throws herself into funding and patronizing the arts.

Rask secretly arranges to transfer Helen from Dr. Frahm's care to doctors from Haber Pharmaceuticals in Berlin without her knowledge or consent.

Helen discovers Rask's secret transfer plan and disappears from the hospital; she is eventually found in severe mental and physical collapse.

Rask seals off Helen's wing at the Swiss hospital, cutting her off from Dr. Frahm and taking total control of her care.

Bevel's autobiography blames the crash of 1929 on reckless female speculators and government overregulation rather than his own lending practices.

Partenza gives the false name Ida Prentice during the hiring process at Bevel's offices, concealing her Italian immigrant background.

Bevel reveals he knows Partenza lied about her background but hires her specifically because of her talent for convincing fabrication.

Bevel instructs Partenza to invent wholesome domestic stories illustrating Mildred's character, ordering her to fabricate an entirely false personality for his wife.

A young man in a pin-striped suit accosts Partenza outside her apartment, threatening to expose her father's communist press to the FBI.

Partenza meets the extortionist at a soda fountain and learns her boyfriend Jack hired him to steal material for a journalism scoop.

Bevel dies unexpectedly of a heart attack before he and Partenza can complete his autobiography, leaving it permanently unfinished.

Mildred's journal reveals that Bevel bribed a stock ticker operator at the New York Stock Exchange to gain illegal profits, which she called criminal.

Mildred predicts the stock market will crash and simultaneously learns she has terminal cancer, which reconciles her to Bevel and drives her to short the market.

A string of fateful choices and hidden truths drives the novel's deeper tragedy, beginning with Rask's growing isolation as wealth removes him further from the human world and culminating in Helen's death at the hands of his need for control. Bevel's autobiography, when read carefully, reveals not patriotism but a man determined to rewrite history through wealth and selective omission, blaming women and regulators for a crash he personally helped engineer. Ida Partenza's own story is defined by turning points—her calculated deceptions in the hiring process, her dawning realization that she is erasing Mildred from history, and her eventual betrayal by the man she thought she loved. The extortion subplot exposes how far Bevel's gravitational power distorts the loyalties of everyone around Partenza. The novel's most explosive revelations come in Mildred's journal, where it emerges that Bevel committed financial crimes and took sole credit for a strategy entirely of her design. Together these turning points argue that the most consequential moments in history are often those that go deliberately unrecorded.