Best Story

PART 1 He had been back to Aldermere exactly twice in four years. Once for the roof — a structural survey in March of the second year, when his estate manager had written to say the east wing was developing a problem that required the duke’s physical presence to authorize the repair costs. He had…

PART 1 The ring lay between them on a square of dark velvet. It was a heavy thing — old gold, square-cut sapphire, the kind of ring that had been in a family long enough to have opinions. The velvet was the color of dried blood. The light coming through the tall windows of Mercastle…

PART 1 The candles had been burning for forty-seven minutes. Petra Voss knew the number precisely because she had been counting the drips of wax from the nearest candelabra since the twentieth minute, when counting became the only alternative to thinking. The chapel of St. Marguerite’s seated two hundred and sixty. Every seat was occupied….

PART 1 The dare began, as most catastrophic things do, with champagne and a woman named Arabella. Cecily Marsh had been in London exactly nine days when Arabella Voss decided her education was incomplete. “You cannot spend the entire season hovering near the potted palms,” Arabella said, pressing a flute of champagne into Cecily’s hand…

PART 1 Claire Ashby had a rule about men at airports. She did not look at them. Not because she was unfriendly or antisocial — she was a woman who could talk to anyone, who had built a successful event planning business on the specific skill of making strangers feel immediately at ease — but…

PART 1 Let me be honest about something from the beginning: I am not a vindictive person. I say this knowing how the rest of this sentence sounds, but I genuinely mean it. I am the kind of woman who apologizes when someone bumps into me. Who tips thirty percent even at bad restaurants because…

PART 1 The invitation had not been for Nadia. She had understood this immediately, the way she understood most things in the Brenn household — not because anyone told her, but because she had spent four years learning to read the difference between what was said and what was meant. What was said: you’ll be…

PART 1 The thing about snipers is that they like angles. Nora had learned this at fourteen, from her father, who taught it the way other fathers taught baseball or driving — practically, without ceremony, as something a person simply needed to know. Before you walk into a room, look for the angles. Before you…

PART 1 She noticed the ice first. Not the candles, not the photographs arranged on the console table near the entrance, not the three dozen lilies that had been browning at the edges since morning and smelled the way lilies always smelled in closed rooms — sweet past the point of sweetness, into something else….

PART 1 The night her father gave her away, it rained in Portland the way it only rained when the sky had something to prove. Nadia Farrow watched the water streak down the window of her father’s car and thought about the specific kind of silence a person made when they had already decided not…