Best Stories

PART 1 For three years, Nora had measured her own worth in the silences her husband allowed her. She thought about that as the wine glass left his hand. Not while it flew — there was no time for thinking then — but a half-second before, when she saw the muscle tighten in his jaw…

PART 1 The locker combination was one she had used for three years, and her hands still couldn’t get it on the first try. Not tonight. She stood in the nurses’ locker room of Metropolitan Hospital with the fluorescent hum above her and her fingers trembling on cold metal and tried three separate times before…

PART 1 The cruelest way to lose someone is not in a fight. It is not in a moment of violence or accusation or tears across a kitchen table. It is watching her stand ten feet away in a room full of people, holding her untouched champagne, wearing the name you gave her like a…

PART 1 The night my fiancé walked in with my sister on his arm, my mother leaned close and said, “Don’t cause a scene, Mira.” Not I’m sorry. Not you didn’t deserve this. Not even are you all right. Just: don’t cause a scene, as if what was happening to me was weather — something…

Part 1 Santino Greco found his secretary at sunrise, half-dead in the sand, with one hand still clenched around the broken champagne glass he had nearly drunk from the night before. For one terrible second, the most feared man on the Gulf Coast did not move. He only stared. Ara Voss lay where the tide…

PART 1 The first thing Daniel Carr noticed was not her face. It was her hands. The way they moved across the glass counter — careful, deliberate, the way you moved when you had done this arithmetic before and knew exactly how bad the answer was going to be. Quarters. Dimes. A few nickels. Two…

PART 1 The most dangerous man in Chicago did not ask Cara Abate whether she was obedient, elegant, quiet, or willing to disappear into someone else’s life. He sat at the far end of a table long enough to require a map, looked straight at her across the ridiculous distance, and said: “Can you cook?”…

PART 1 He said it quietly. That was the part I could never explain to people afterward — how something that quietly destroyed you could leave so little sound. The wedding band was playing. Two hundred guests were talking and laughing and watching my sister Mia float across the dance floor in her ivory dress….

PART 1 Nobody in that dining room ever asked whether I spoke Italian. That was their assumption, and I wore it the way I wore everything in Nicholas Caruso’s penthouse — quietly, usefully, and without complaint. I was the maid. I was the woman against the wall with her hands folded and her face arranged…

Part 1 Salvatore Bianchi raised his champagne glass and announced to a room full of Chicago’s most dangerous men that Victor Romano had finally become pathetic. “Sixty-one years old, mourning a dead wife, chasing a waitress young enough to be his daughter,” Salvatore said, smiling as laughter rolled through the private club. “The old lion…