Five months later, on June twelfth, Celia stood in Ruth’s bedroom in a green dress and wondered whether it was possible to be thirty weeks pregnant and still look as though she’d come on a date. “Turn around,” Ruth said. Celia turned. The dress fell softly from beneath her breasts, skimmed her stomach and ended …
The apartment had no kitchen cabinet doors, a bathroom window painted shut, and the first room Celia had wanted for herself in seven years. “Those will be back on,” the owner said, following her gaze to the cabinets. “Everything will. I can’t hand it over until July first. The people doing the repairs have given …
By Monday morning Celia had decided Adrian Sato was probably a teacher, or an architect who had forgotten to dress like one. Something that accounted for his interest in how things worked and his lack of interest in keeping his clothes clean. Then a long black car pulled into the depot yard, and he stepped …
The man kneeling in the bus aisle looked up at Celia and said, “Would you mind holding that door? I’m about to do something badly.” She had expected Imogen. She had expected, at most, to shake hands with a few volunteers and pretend she was a person who had slept. Instead there was a cardboard …
“I’m leaving you, Celia, but Mom can’t know until after Sunday—you’ll need to act like we’re still engaged at her retirement lunch.” Quentin laid the guest list beside the cutting board. She had been peeling a pear for his mother. Dorothy liked them poached, and Celia had promised to bring the dessert when the family …
Chapter 1: The Eight Words “I want a divorce. I’m marrying Camilla Vane.” The words landed in the center of the room like something dropped from a great height, and for a moment Wren Halliday simply looked at her husband, waiting for the rest of the sentence to arrive and make sense of the first …
Sarah’s moving day starts with three polished women blocking her driveway and judging her Target sundress. They run the cul-de-sac by snubs and rules, until the new neighbor quietly starts winning people over.
On a rare weekend away, a high school English teacher signs a timeshare contract over a second glass of champagne. When the fees start multiplying and the salesman disappears, she finds other owners who want their money back.
An architect gets fined over her daughter’s scooter and a garage door two shades off, then the HOA threatens to foreclose. Her neighbors are filming each other now, and she starts pulling the board’s own paperwork apart.
Claire is a senior auditor who tracks missing pennies for a living, yet someone keeps stealing her lunch from the office fridge. She sets a trap of UV powder and a hidden tracker, and the trail leads somewhere nobody expected.
