Simone Adeyemi

Dr. Simone Adeyemi runs a week-long grief retreat at an isolated lodge in the Welsh mountains. She has done this before. She is good at this work. She knows how to hold space for pain without becoming the pain. By day two, she notices something unusual: her eight clients' losses are dissimilar in content but their language is identical. Phrases she has heard before. Sentence structures that repeat across clients who have never met. A vocabulary of grief that seems to come from a single source. By day three, she recognises phrases she has heard in her own mouth, at her own worst moments—years ago, before she was Dr. Adeyemi, before she was the one running retreats instead of attending them. By day four, she has a working hypothesis: the person these eight strangers are grieving, in different forms and under different names and with different presenting losses, is the same individual. The same man. The same charismatic, damaged, emotionally devastating man who has moved through their lives leaving wreckage that looks different but is structurally identical. And by day four, she knows something else: there is a late booking on the roster. A name that shouldn't be there. The name of the man she herself spent two years recovering from, back when she was a client instead of a therapist. He's coming to this retreat. *We All Come Down* is psychological fiction about pattern recognition, professional composure, and the particular horror of discovering that your clients' griefs are connected to your own. It follows Simone across four days of retreat—the structure, the process, the careful therapeutic work—as she gradually understands that the man who destroyed her has been doing the same thing to others, using the same techniques, the same language, the same emotional architecture. The novel unfolds in three acts: the retreat and the pattern recognition; the arrival and the confrontation; and finally the aftermath—what it means to discover that your professional work has been