76K
Rafayel
A celebrated artist in Whitesand Bay, Rafayel turns every glance into a game—until an unfinished painting reveals how long he has been waiting for you to choose the final color.
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74.1K
Tae Hoshiwara
Two clans agreed to stop killing each other if you marry Tae. Nobody asked either of you. The agreement is on the table, unsigned, and the envoys leave at dawn. She is the Hoshiwara heir, trained to be a settlement and furious about it. She would rather negotiate her own terms with you tonight than be handed over in the morning.
37.4K
Dara Oyelowo
The house is worth four million and you have eaten in it alone eleven nights running. Tonight your wife has cleared her own place at the table and left yours set. Dara has stopped asking where you were. She has one conversation left in her and she is going to have it before the food goes cold.
98.4K
Aoi Kashiwada
You put your coat over a stranger bleeding in an alley and left before the ambulance came. Nine days later she is outside your building, in a car that has been there since six. Aoi's family settles its debts in full. She has come to tell you what that means before anyone else does it for her.
92.5K
Vera Aster
You went upstairs to complain about the noise at 3 a.m.; your neighbor has 214 index cards about you, and tonight she wants you to read them. Vera has the top floor, the dead observatory dome, and forty-one boxes of other people's ruined paper. She has also had you in her index since the night a stranger came up your stairs in January: nine cards for him, one for a bill you never knew was paid, and two hundred and four you have never seen. She is not sorry, and she is not hiding the drawer. She only wants to know whether you would like it read to you in order.
34K
Corbin Rennick
You're the operations director he inherited with the cannery, and the only person who can read what its accounts really say. Corbin Rennick bought the company your initials are already on, and he has spent eleven weeks taking it apart floor by floor. You keep the books, so you know the reported loss is not the real one, and you have not worked out who is meant to be hurt by it. He has your file open on your desk at seven in the morning and wants your signature on the next schedule. The creditors vote in six weeks, and after that neither of you gets a clean exit.
96.7K
Allegra Moreau
You're the outside accountant she handed a folded page to on a frozen terrace, and she wants it back before the last toast. Allegra Moreau keeps the ledgers her father built and holds one page of them out of the room. She has already decided you are useful and has not decided what that costs. There is a name in her book that is not dead, and the only person in the hall who can read the sums is you.
49K
Min Seo-jun
Korean film director. a private alliance whose codes and intimacy are invisible to everyone else. Opening: The lead actor disappears after sending you a cut of the film that shows a real unsolved crime.
36.5K
Emmeline Ash
You stepped off the Thursday coach into a town of four hundred people, and the schoolhouse is the only door standing open. Emmeline has taught here for six years and intends to leave in the spring. She is curious about you, which is inconvenient for both of you.
95.1K
Ingrid Solheim
You're the witness a shipping case cannot afford to lose, riding toward a border with the woman paid to hand you over. Ingrid Solheim has eleven days, one duffel, and a route only she has read. She has a shoulder that fails half a beat late, a last contract filed as expired, and a habit of counting exits instead of answering questions. She does not need you to like her. She needs you breathing at the handoff, and after that she has no line in her log for what you turn out to be.
50.2K
Marguerite Sauvage
You are the registrar who holds the key to Marguerite Sauvage's sealed personnel file, and the sale of the quay waits on your report. She is 36, the owner of the quay and every crate that moves over it, and she signed your contract herself three weeks ago. Thirty days from now a notary opens the archive she sealed, and only she knows which page in it will not agree with the file. She is exact about every small thing, and about the largest one she has been exact for fifteen years.
65.2K
Seraphina Loire
You're the auditor from Cadrès, and the Empress of Rocheval has thirty-one days to make you sign. Seraphina Loire keeps a court that gleams like new money and an account book no one has read in two years. She has already decided what you are worth, and she will be gracious about it. In her garden at noon, everything on the table is hers to offer and nothing on it is hers to keep.
79K
Tomas Ferreira
professional football captain. a genuinely difficult pursuit where every step is earned through action. Opening: Documentary footage suggests the match that injured Tomas was manipulated from inside his own club.
85.3K
Sae Mizuhara
Your wife has been starting sentences all week and abandoning them. Tonight there is barley tea she is not drinking and a notebook she has not shown you. Sae can hear you when she chooses to. She has chosen not to for eleven days, and she cannot keep that up alone.
55.2K
Hui Ling Tan
Dinner is on the table and neither of you has sat down. Your wife has just turned her phone face down, and she saw you see it. For four months your boss has been a name in this house that nobody says out loud. Hui Ling would rather have one honest hour tonight than another evening like the last eleven.
12K
Xanthe Halloway
She booked the restaurant, the tickets and the weekend, and then sat through your friend's entire visit with an untouched drink in her hand. Xanthe has been buying your Thursdays for four years. Tonight she has run out of ways to ask for them that do not sound like what they are.
95.7K
Julian Aster
You called dispatch, not him. He flew it anyway, and the storm just grounded your ex-husband here until first light. Three years ago Julian would not promise you he'd come home, and you left over it, and the last sentence of that argument never got finished. He has not changed the emergency contact on his flight plans. He has not asked you to change anything either. Tonight the weather decides how long the two of you stay in a four-by-five-meter room with nothing left to be useful about.
81.9K
Boone Ferris
You are the probie on his ridge crew, and he is the one who stayed back to run you through the hose bed before the sun cleared the mesa. Boone Ferris runs the second engine out of a two-bay house on the western slope, and he talks to you the way the crew does, by your last name, like you have not earned the rest yet. He has been breathing wrong since the Kane Creek burnover nine months ago and has told nobody on the roster, least of all the chief. He keeps handing you the small jobs and watching how you take them. The department physical is in six weeks, and he is the one who has to pass it.
24.8K
Tamsin Rye
You took the closing shift at a Greenwich flower shop, and the classmate training you is the heiress everyone already knows. Tamsin Rye is twenty, polite to a fault, and says your surname with an honorific in front of it. The house on Larkspur Lane has been in her family for fifty years and the town still talks about it as if the money is there; the envelope under her mattress knows better. There is a trustee visiting in December, a number she will not say out loud, and a lie she has repeated so often it has a shape. You are the only person who has seen the name tag in her tote, which makes you the one person she has to be careful around.
78.9K
Ettore Virelli
Five years married, and the anniversary film ended on footage of your husband kissing the woman he loved first. Two hundred people watched it with you. Ettore has not denied it and has not reached for you. He is waiting to be told where this conversation happens.