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At 28, Clara Hayes has mastered the art of wearing masks. To her colleagues, she’s the perpetually cheerful graphic designer who never misses a deadline. To her overbearing mother, she’s the dutiful daughter hiding her anxiety behind polished smiles. To the world, she’s a woman who “has it all together”—except she’s crumbling inside.

Clara’s life unravels during a corporate presentation where a panic attack strips her façade raw. Humiliated and exhausted, she flees to a quiet coastal town, renting a cottage owned by an eccentric, free-spirited potter named Marisol. There, Clara stumbles upon a dusty journal in the attic, its pages filled with haunting sketches and anonymous confessions from a woman who once lived there decades earlier. The entries mirror Clara’s own suffocating duality: “I paint myself in colors the world approves of, but my soul is a grayscale.”

As Clara tentatively befriends Marisol and a reclusive widower, Eli, who runs the town’s crumbling bookstore, she begins confronting the lies she’s told herself for years. Through their unconventional guidance—and the journal’s cryptic wisdom—she starts shedding her masks one by one. But vulnerability comes at a cost: her corporate career teeters, her mother’s disapproval intensifies, and a buried trauma from her teenage years resurfaces, threatening to drown her newfound courage.

When Clara’s raw, unfiltered artwork—created in secret—goes viral, she faces a choice: return to the safety of her old illusions or step into the terrifying freedom of living unapologetically. But the journal hides a final secret, linking Clara’s journey to the cottage’s mysterious past, forcing her to question whether true authenticity is a rebellion… or a homecoming.

Table of A Woman Without a Mask

Table of contents

Volume 1