All Chapters of The Pieces She Left Behind: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Six weeks later, Mara had a system.It wasn't a good system, but it was hers. Wake up at 6:14 — never 6:15, never 6:00, the specificity felt important. Coffee from the deli on the corner because the espresso machine in her new apartment made a sound like a dying animal, and she hadn't had the energy to get it fixed. Subway at 7:03. Window seat if possible, standing if not. Podcast in her ears so she didn't have to think.She'd moved forty-three blocks south and a whole universe away from the life she'd had on 74th Street.The new apartment was smaller. Third floor, no elevator, a radiator that clanged every night at exactly 2 a.m. like it had something urgent to say. The walls were a shade of white that couldn't decide if it was yellow. The previous tenant had left a rubber plant by the window that Mara had fully intended to throw out and then somehow kept watering instead.She'd named it Gerald.Gerald was, at this point, her most stable relationship.She worked at Voss & Laine Edito

She had no reason to go back to Brooklyn.She told herself this on Wednesday. On Thursday. On Friday morning, while she was on the subway going exactly the opposite direction, toward the office, toward the manuscript on her desk, and the eleven emails she hadn't answered, and the very normal, very manageable life she was rebuilding one careful brick at a time.She had no reason.And then Nathan called at 4:47 p.m. on Friday and gave her one."I need you to come see the new chapters in person," he said.Mara switched her phone to the other ear and kept walking. "Nathan, you can email them.""I can't.""You absolutely can. You have my email address. You've used it.""It has to be in person." A pause. "I work better when someone's physically present. It's how my brain is wired.""That's not how brains work.""Mara." His voice went soft in the way it did when he was about to say something he'd actually thought about. "I'm close. I can feel it. I just need — I need someone in the room. Som

He didn't tell Jade about the market.This was notable because he told Jade most things. Eventually, in the edited version, he kept for people who loved him and worried too much. He told her about Nathan's crisis. He told her about Biscuit and the hostage negotiation. He even told her about the literary agent who'd shown up on the stoop and shaken his hand like she was closing a deal.He didn't tell her about Saturday.He wasn't sure what that meant. He was fairly sure he knew exactly what it meant and was choosing not to examine it, which was, he recognized, becoming a pattern where Mara Voss was concerned.Sunday dinner at Jade's was in Astoria, which meant the N train, which meant forty minutes of sitting with himself and his thoughts, which was forty minutes longer than he preferred lately.Jade's apartment smelled like garlic and the specific warmth of a home that was actually lived in — throw blankets on every surface, her daughter Maya's drawings taped to the refrigerator, a do

She listened to it on Sunday morning.Not Saturday night — Saturday night she'd been deliberately busy, reorganizing her bookshelf by color because she needed her hands occupied and her brain pointed at something with a clear outcome. She'd moved Gerald six inches to the left to catch better light. She'd made tea she didn't drink. She'd gone to bed at ten and stared at the ceiling for forty minutes before her body finally gave up and let her sleep.Sunday morning, she sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet — she didn't know why the floor, it just felt right, felt low enough to the ground that whatever happened next couldn't knock her over — and pressed play.Hey. It's me.His voice was the same. That was the first thing. She'd half expected it to sound different — smaller, or distorted, the way things looked different after a long time away. But it was just Daniel's voice, the one she'd heard every day for three years, familiar in the way of something you didn't ch

The bookstore was the kind that looked small from the outside and kept going.A narrow door between a dry cleaner and a wine bar, no sign except the word MARGINS in small brass letters above the frame. Inside it opened up — two rooms, then a third, connected by doorways that felt accidental, like the books had simply claimed more space over time and the building had accommodated them out of respect.Mara stopped two steps in and just looked.Floor to ceiling on every wall. A rolling ladder on a brass rail in the first room. Armchairs in corners that appeared to have been there long enough to have developed opinions. The smell of old paper and something faintly cedar-like, like the shelves themselves were contributing to the atmosphere.A cat was asleep on the front desk."His name is Index," said the man behind the desk, not looking up from whatever he was reading. He was somewhere between sixty and a hundred, with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and the unhurried air of som