Three weeks later, Ethan turned nine. It wasn’t a party, not really, not in the way the birthday three weeks earlier had been. There were no string quartets, no hundred guests in gowns and tuxedos, no chandeliers casting careful gold light over a room full of people pretending not to know what Dominic Moretti actually … Read more
The Boy Who Kept Watch
Sam
Chapter One: The Red Mark Noah had started counting the bad days on his fingers. He didn’t tell anyone he did it. He didn’t tell Mia, because Mia was five and still believed that if you didn’t talk about a thing, the thing eventually forgot to be true. He didn’t tell Dad, because Dad worked … Read more
Chapter 6: The Trap
Sam
The plan Dominic built over the following two days was, in his own words, “elegant enough to work and simple enough that nothing complicated could get Lily hurt in the process,” which I understood to mean he had rejected at least a dozen more dangerous versions before settling on this one. It worked like this: … Read more
The Secret Life of Henrietta, Chapter 2: The Inspection
I had, in fact, forgotten about the inspection, which is the kind of thing you only forget once in your life, because the consequences teach you so thoroughly you never let it happen again. Our HOA does an annual walk through of every garage on the block, ostensibly to check for fire code violations, though … Read more
The Apple Cake We Almost Didn’t Make
Oh my goodness, let me tell you about the one time my mother and I nearly ruined Thanksgiving over a cake. It wasn’t even a fancy cake. Just an apple cake — dense, a little sunken in the middle, the kind that looks unimpressive on a plate and then disappears in about four minutes flat. … Read more
The Woman Next Door Who Fed Half the Street
Oh my goodness, let me tell you about Mrs. Kowalski, who lived two doors down and was, for about a decade of my life, the reason I ever learned to actually cook anything. She wasn’t family. I want to say that clearly, because the way I talk about her, people always assume she must have … Read more