Best Stories

PART 1 The table at the back of Nora’s wine bar had a chip in it. Not a metaphor. An actual chip — worn smooth at the corner nearest the wall, the kind that happened when too many people pressed their elbows there over too many bad evenings. Mia Reyes had been pressing her elbow…

PART 1 Three days after the fire, Cara Reyes could still taste smoke. She told herself this was psychosomatic. Smoke inhalation had been mild — the doctor who had come to the safe house described her injuries as severe bruising, mild smoke inhalation, and a concussion, which he delivered with the specific professional calm of…

PART 1 My father’s gambling table had a chip-edged special plate. That is the thing I keep coming back to. The detail that does not belong in this story but insists on staying. He ate from it every Sunday — soup, always — and when I was small I used to ask him why he…

PART 1 The vase was her first mistake. Not because it broke — although it did break, white porcelain on marble, the kind of sound that could mean anything in a house like this. Her first mistake was her reaction. A trained undercover detective did not flinch when something broke. She recovered, looked appropriately startled…

PART 1 I have been in a lot of strange rooms. The supply closet of a midtown law firm where I ate lunch because the break room made me too visible. The bathroom of a CVS on Atlantic Avenue where I sat on the floor for twenty minutes staring at two lines. The office of…

PART 1 He came every Friday. Nora Holt — who had been coming to this section of the cemetery for three months because her own family was buried here, two rows over — had seen him enough times to notice the pattern. Dark coat. White roses. He never stayed long. He would stand before the…

PART 1 I have been working for Damien Voss for two years, nine months, and fourteen days, and in all that time, he has never asked me a personal question. He has asked me to locate a missing contract at eleven-thirty PM on a Friday. He has asked me whether the Matsuda group would respond…

PART 1 The thing about working for someone dangerous is that you learn to read the room before the room reads you. My name is Sera Calloway, and I have been reading Luca Ferrante’s rooms for three years, two months, and eleven days. I know the room when he’s running on four hours of sleep…

PART 1 The seating chart told me everything I needed to know about where I stood. That thought belongs to a different story. This one starts with a wrong number. My name is Mara Veles. I am thirty-two years old. I write about money — specifically, about the ways that money moves when it doesn’t…

PART 1 The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which I know because Tuesdays were school pickup days, and I had to read it three times standing in my kitchen while Iris’s violin lesson played through the ceiling of the apartment above us. My name is Dr. Nora Vane. I am thirty-one years old. I am…