PART 1 She had stopped counting the blocks two hours ago. Not because she was lost — Lena Varro had grown up in this part of Chicago, had walked these streets in every season since she was seven years old — but because counting required a kind of forward thinking her mind had stopped being…
PART 1 The thing about cleaning other people’s homes was that you learned them. Not in the way they wanted to be known — not through the photographs on the mantles or the books arranged on shelves by color, not through the artwork chosen to suggest taste and the flowers changed weekly to suggest care….
PART 1 She kept an inventory. Not a written one. Margot Voss had learned early that written things could be found, photographed, used. Her inventory lived in a part of her mind she had trained to stay separate from everything else — a running list, updated each night, of what she still had that was…
PART 1 The rule was printed in bold on the cover of the staff manual. No employee is to access the third floor under any circumstances. Cora Maddox had read it twice on her first morning, sitting in a reception office across from a man named Adler who wore a suit that cost more than…
PART 1 The card that fell out of her pocket was what stopped him. Elias Varro had seen many things come through the back entrance of Casement — the restaurant he owned on paper and occupied in practice every Tuesday and Thursday evening from eight until late. He had seen men come through that door…
PART 1 The last photograph my mother ever took of me hangs in her office. I’m twenty-two in it, in the pale blue dress she selected, smiling the way she taught me to smile — mouth closed, eyes slightly down, nothing too bold. She’d arranged the shot herself, choosing the angle that caught the light…
PART 1 Eleanor Vane had been keeping a list since her second season. Not a list of prospects, as her mother would have preferred. Not a list of eligible gentlemen with their incomes and estates and family connections helpfully catalogued. Eleanor’s list was something else entirely: a record of things people said when they thought…
PART 1 The servants of Caldwell House had one rule above all others. Do not look at the Duke’s face. Not the butler, not the footmen, not the maids who changed his linens and swept his hearths. They kept their eyes angled down or away, trained to the floor, to the wall, to whatever point…
PART 1 The carriage passed at exactly half past eight. Clara Voss knew this because she had been watching for it, and because she had learned, in the months since the announcement, to time her mornings around it. The Earl of Aldenmoor kept predictable hours. His carriage left Aldenmoor House each day at half past…
PART 1 There were two kinds of Sundays at Ashford Park. Before Sundays, and after Sundays. Before was the kind where the piano in the east drawing room was played by someone — her mother, before she got sick, and then her father, who was not as good as her mother but who played with…
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