PART 1 Mira Calloway had a theory about dinner parties. Her theory, developed over twenty-three years of attending events she was too observant for, was that the purpose of the aristocratic dinner was not the food, the conversation, or even the social advancement that her mother frequently cited as justification for the elaborate preparation involved….
PART 1 On the third shelf of Cecily Marsh’s private bookcase, between a volume of Keats and an atlas of the Mediterranean, lived a book that did not belong to her. It was a small thing — a collection of essays on the philosophy of natural law, bound in dark green cloth with gilt lettering,…
PART 1 The morning of her wedding, Eleanor Voss made a list. This was not unusual. Eleanor had been making lists since she was nine years old — grocery lists, reading lists, lists of French vocabulary and Italian irregular verbs and the names of every peer of the realm in order of precedence. Lists were…
PART 1 The morning Eleanor Ashby gave away her last piece of bread, she had not eaten since the previous Tuesday. This was not a dramatic circumstance as she experienced it. She had been managing on reduced meals for two years, which was long enough that hunger had stopped feeling like an emergency and started…
PART 1 Nora Vane had been to exactly one wedding in the past four years, and it had been her own. That wedding had lasted eleven months before her husband decided that the woman he actually wanted was his business partner, Elena, who had the specific quality — Nora had concluded, during the long and…
PART 1 The card had been in her coat pocket for four months. Rosa Medina had transferred it from her winter coat to her spring jacket to her winter coat again, always meaning to throw it away, always not quite doing it. It was a business card, heavy stock, no logo, just a name and…
PART 1 The wedding photograph arrived on Riordan Voss’s desk three days before the ceremony. He had not asked for it. His second, Callum, had placed it there with the briefing materials — the financial summary of the proposed alliance, the territorial maps, the names and histories of the relevant parties. The photograph was not…
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…
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