The story of William “Willie” Miller is a darkly humorous chronicle of an engineer’s lifelong, obsessive quest for Total Predictability in a chaotic world . Haunted by the abandonment of his engineer father, Sean, and the subsequent loss of his mother, the young Willie (age 5-45) views his life as a series of structural failures. After a desperate, five-year, and ultimately fruitless Forensic Structural Investigation to locate his vanished father across the globe, Willie resolves to build a life immune to decay.

By age 30, Willie designs his perfect existence: a successful Regional Manager career, a high-efficiency marriage to Clara, and the birth of his charismatic daughter, Lia. His one unpredictable inheritance – his father’s luxury cruiser, My Princess – becomes the family’s symbol of stability and connection. Reaching 40, Willie achieves peak structural equilibrium. He navigates the complexities of parenting Lia (now 15, a talented hockey player) and strategically hires her ambitious boyfriend, Lucas, to maintain Controlled Containment.

This period of structural grace ends abruptly at age 50 when Willie is killed in a random, catastrophic car crash – an Irreversible Structural Failure outside the scope of his control. The system immediately collapses. Lia, age 19, unable to cope with the unbearable density of presence of her grief, seeks the “quiet place” her father sought. She enacts her own Protocol Breach, commandeering the My Princess for a solo voyage that defies all logic.

Three weeks later, the My Princess is recovered near Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, 3,500 nautical miles away, empty and perfectly intact. Lia is never found. The final chapter concludes that Willie’s life was a testament to the fact that the emotional load on the human system will always exceed the structural capacity of even the most perfectly engineered design. Lucas and Clara are left behind, permanent custodians of the stable home and the Permanent Missing Load that is Lia’s ghost.