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About
Céline Bernard grew up on the cliffs above Antibes, the only daughter of a Swiss pharmaceutical dynasty, raised among money and silence and a family that managed its damage in private. Simon Walker grew up in a house where love was rationed, a boy with a prosthetic leg who was told by his mother that the wrong child had died, who walked away at seventeen with nothing and was rebuilt by a nurse who opened her door before he could ring the bell.
They met on the Pacific Crest Trail, in a hidden valley in the Sierra Nevada, where he had set two plates beside a fire, and she came down off a ridge. She was twenty-one. He was twenty-three. Within weeks, she had begun designing the rest of his life - a path from construction sites to cancer laboratories - with the same operational brilliance she would later bring to running one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Europe. He became the quiet, steady center of hers.
They married young. They built extraordinary lives. And then, slowly, without either of them choosing it, they built those lives in different directions - she in the boardrooms of Geneva and São Paulo, he in the laboratories of San Francisco - until the distance between them became something neither of them knew how to name.
When a single act of violence puts Simon in a coma, Céline begins a forty-two-day vigil at his bedside. Night after night, she tells him their story - all of it, from the beginning, including the things she has never been brave enough to say - because she has run out of other ways to keep him in the room.
The Held Breath is a novel about love, ambition, and the cost of building a life with someone when the building keeps pulling you apart. It asks whether two people who have given everything to their work can find their way back to each other - and whether the truth, told honestly and almost too late, is enough.
They met on the Pacific Crest Trail, in a hidden valley in the Sierra Nevada, where he had set two plates beside a fire, and she came down off a ridge. She was twenty-one. He was twenty-three. Within weeks, she had begun designing the rest of his life - a path from construction sites to cancer laboratories - with the same operational brilliance she would later bring to running one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Europe. He became the quiet, steady center of hers.
They married young. They built extraordinary lives. And then, slowly, without either of them choosing it, they built those lives in different directions - she in the boardrooms of Geneva and São Paulo, he in the laboratories of San Francisco - until the distance between them became something neither of them knew how to name.
When a single act of violence puts Simon in a coma, Céline begins a forty-two-day vigil at his bedside. Night after night, she tells him their story - all of it, from the beginning, including the things she has never been brave enough to say - because she has run out of other ways to keep him in the room.
The Held Breath is a novel about love, ambition, and the cost of building a life with someone when the building keeps pulling you apart. It asks whether two people who have given everything to their work can find their way back to each other - and whether the truth, told honestly and almost too late, is enough.