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PART 1 The thing about being a mother is that you stop being afraid of the right things. Before Mateo, I was afraid of sensible things. Being fired. Running out of money. Calling the wrong number at two in the morning. After Mateo, I was afraid of temperatures. Of the specific quality of a cry…

PART 1 I had cried exactly twice in six years of managing our lives. Once the night I identified my parents. Once the night I told Cara — nine years old, still in her pajamas, asking why I was late picking her up from the neighbor’s — that they were not coming home. After that,…

PART 1 Major had one eye. He had always had one eye — not because Ethan had lost the other one, but because their father had given Major to Ethan on the same night he explained about their mother, and somewhere in the explanation the button had come off, and their father had said: he…

PART 1 Lily knew before Owen did. She knew the way she always knew things — not from being told, which didn’t happen, but from watching. The specific way Diana moved through the terminal, too fast for them to easily keep up, too fast for a woman who was bringing children somewhere and planning to…

PART 1 Elsie Veron spent three days making a plan. She did not tell anyone. Her mother would have said no, which was why it had to be a secret, and also why Elsie had to be very sure before she did it, because once her mother said no to something it stayed no even…

PART 1 The morning Daniel Voss made his decision, he woke up before the alarm and lay in the dark listening to a city that never actually went quiet. He was thirty-nine years old. His company, Voss Systems, had been valued at twelve billion dollars in the last round of funding. He owned a penthouse…

PART 1 Nora Thibodeau arrived at the Voss estate on a Tuesday morning in October with three things: a letter of recommendation from her previous employer that was genuine but modest, a pair of shoes with a sole coming loose on the left, and a melody her grandmother had taught her before she died. The…

PART 1 The pen was still in his hand when the phone rang. Damon Vale had been in his lawyer’s office for forty-five minutes, which was twenty minutes longer than he had intended and fifteen minutes longer than Marcus — his lawyer, his college roommate, the man who had stood beside him at a wedding…

PART 1 Nadia and Clara Reyes started their mornings with a list. Not a written list — paper was something they rationed, used for school assignments and the occasional note their mother needed for a hospital visit. The list lived in their heads, rehearsed the way other children rehearsed multiplication tables. Today’s list, which was…

PART 1 I had been counting exits for three months. It started as practicality. After I left Daniel Marsh — after I packed the last of my things while he was at work and took the three-forty train to Mia’s couch — I found myself cataloguing escape routes the way other people catalogue groceries. The…