Best Stories

PART 1 The car had been on the highway for forty minutes when Nadia Voss finally stopped pretending she was not afraid. Not of the destination. She had read the contract twice, understood its terms, and was capable of making decisions she was not entirely comfortable with when the alternative was worse. What she was…

PART 1 On the eighty-first day of her exile, Sofia Battaglia made a decision. She decided to stop being angry. Not because the anger had been wrong. The anger had been entirely correct, factually supported, and attached to a specific cause, which was that her brother Luca had put her on a plane to Lisbon…

PART 1 Three months before the wedding, Isla Ferraro sat at the window of her father’s house at midnight and tried to understand what her life was worth. Not philosophically. Practically. She had spent the afternoon in her father’s study — the room where agreements happened and the people involved in them were not always…

PART 1 The morning after Matteo Serrano came into the café, Cora Delvaux counted the money three times. Not because she doubted the amount. She counted it because she was trying to understand what it meant. Two hundred dollars. Under an espresso cup. At a table where the coffee cost four-fifty and the tip should…

PART 1 The last prenatal vitamin. Celestina Reyes held it in her palm and looked at it under the kitchen light of her Pilsen apartment, the one with the water stain above the window that had been there when she moved in and that she had stopped seeing two weeks after. The vitamin was the…

PART 1 I was in the staff bathroom listening to a voicemail when it happened. This was the specific quality of fear after four months: not sharp anymore. Not the kind that made you run. The kind that lived in your body like a low sound, a frequency you had gotten used to and could…

PART 1 The birthday cake was my own idea. I had stopped waiting for Jason to remember three years ago, which was approximately when the quality of his attention narrowed from genuine to performed, and performed eventually to nothing. I learned to buy my own flowers, plan my own evenings, and celebrate the specific way…

PART 1 At two in the morning, my son kicked me awake. This was new. For four months he had been barely there — a presence more like memory than fact, something I knew about in the abstract — and then two weeks ago he had become real, suddenly and consistently, with opinions about my…

PART 1 The schedule change came at nine-fifteen the previous evening. I was sitting at the kitchen table in the house Ryan and I had owned for six years, grading the Spanish vocabulary flashcards I made for my niece on Sunday evenings as a kind of ritual, when my phone lit up with a message…

PART 1 The test was still warm. Nora Calloway stood inside the narrow bathroom stall on the forty-first floor of the Harrington Tower, pressing her back against the cold door while the city of Chicago burned gold and steel thirty stories below. She had not meant to take the test here, at a black-tie fundraiser…