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PART 1 Vera Ovsyannikova had a rule about the Sicilian dialect at work. She didn’t use it. She worked at Caruso’s, a diner on the west side of Chicago that served the kind of food that didn’t require explanation — eggs, pasta, coffee strong enough to justify the hour. She had been there for eight…

PART 1 The first thing Nora Voss noticed when she arrived at the Meridian Gala was that the flower arrangements were wrong. Not aesthetically wrong — the orchids and white roses were impeccably arranged, and the florist had clearly understood that the gala’s aesthetic was serious money performing casual elegance. What was wrong was structural….

PART 1 Cole Varcetti was not looking for anything when he walked onto the beach. He had come to this stretch of the Oregon coast every August for the past seven years, since his brother Jonah died, because Jonah had loved it here and because coming back was the only form of grief that felt…

PART 1 Rosa Ferrara had a rule about the Sicilian dialect. She did not speak it at work. She had worked at Tavola — one of the finest Italian restaurants in New York — for eleven months, and in that time she had heard Sicilian spoken twice: once by the head sommelier, who came from…

PART 1 Anna Moreau did not leave in anger. She had decided this months ago: she was not going to leave in anger, because leaving in anger was what he expected, and what he expected he knew how to manage. Anger was familiar. Anger was something a person could dismiss as unstable, as overreaction, as…

PART 1 She was counting the wrong thing. Eva Reyes had been working the closing shift at the Star Diner for eleven months, which meant she had counted her tips every night for eleven months, and every night the result was the same: not enough, and specifically not enough in the specific categories that mattered….

PART 1 The first thing Mara Collins did when she took a job was photograph the space. Not literally — she had left that life — but the specific act of visual cataloguing that her training had made automatic: entry points, sight lines, structural cover, the location of anything that could serve as a weapon…

PART 1 I have a habit of doing things I’ll regret in pairs. The first thing I did that night: I drank an entire bottle of Pinot Grigio alone on my kitchen floor while reading through three years of text messages between me and Derek, looking for the exact moment it had started to go…

PART 1 The thing about counting is that it gave you something to do with your mind when your body had nothing left. Nora Vasquez had been counting for four years. Tonight she was counting tiles in the executive bathroom on the thirty-eighth floor of the Meridian Building, because she had been awake for nineteen…

PART 1 The first thing I did when I got to the house was check the gate code. Mom had given it to me when I was nine, because she said if there was ever an emergency and she wasn’t home and I needed somewhere safe to go, the Aldren estate had security and a…