Nine Perfect Strangers By Liane Moriarty Novels & Stories

Something warm and terrifying and new. I'm starting to feel something for this man I barely know. This stranger who doesn't ask for anything, who doesn't make me feel small, who looks at me like I'm whole instead of broken. And that terrifies me more than Bryan’s betrayal ever did. Because caring again means risking everything all over again. And I don't know if I'm strong enough to survive another ending.

Unnoticed, forgotten. Ethan stirred awake. Sunlight spilled across the suite, and he reached for a glass of water. His eyes caught the necklace. The delicate gold chain. Heart-shaped pendant. He held it like a treasure, something precious, priceless, the weight of it heavy in his palm. A strange smile crossed his lips. Even without a name, even without a face, Ethan knew something had changed. That night, a thread had been tied between two strangers — a thread he would carry, unknowingly, for years to come.

In the worst kind of situation… my body still had the goddamn nerves to betray me. Damn, this was truly not my day. A last-minute drive to the airport, finally heading home, and now it had all gone to hell. Two strangers. One lying dead in the front seat. The other staring straight through me with dark, filthy thoughts burning in his eyes. A gun gripped loosely in his hand… and f++k if that didn’t make him even hotter. Shit. His gaze darkened more intensely, settling on my cleavage. And I stopped breathing.

I waited for eight years. What I got was his ninety-ninth canceled wedding, watching him hold another woman in his arms while feeding her drinks, and him forcing my hands onto broken glass just to make another woman happy. That was when I woke up from the dream. When I opened my eyes, dawn was already breaking outside. Pale light spread across the ocean’s surface. The pillow beneath my face was damp, though I didn’t know when I had started crying. The things happening back in Corholt reached me through the Anderson family’s intelligence network.

Almost instinctively, I pulled out my phone and checked my browsing history for the video from last night. In it, the side profiles of the two elderly people were identical to the faces of my in-laws standing before me now. If the clip hadn't flashed by so quickly, I would have recognized them right away. And in other videos—those fleeting, fragmented moments—my wife, Cynthia Muller, appeared again and again, holding a child in her arms. The little boy called her "Mom" with intimate affection. Under a sky lit by fireworks, the man held her close and kissed her.

The east windows waited for morning. Outside the city moved in its November configuration, amber and dark, doing what it had always done regardless of what was happening on the ninth floor of a building with a green awning on Calloway Street. Inside, two people sat at a table and ate pasta with the correct surface area and finishing oil applied at the proper moment, and talked, and were present, and were home. The stranger who had stayed was still staying. He was going to keep staying. And Daniel Rogers — who had missed a bus by forty-seven seconds, who had been found by someone who had been looking for him for nine years, who had spent thirteen months learning to let himself be found — held

Tracie clamped her hand around my throat and slowly tightened the grip as she fixed her eyes on me. "Human life is so fragile, Jonas. Tell me, which one do you think will happen first? You leaking a story or your mom dying?" My eyes widened in disbelief as my body began to tremble I knew she wasn't bluffing. People who'd threatened her the same way found their parents dead the next day, and they'd be thrown into the sea. It was easy to make someone disappear, but I never expected those words to come from the woman I once loved. "Have you thought it through?"

I frantically searched my pockets, but the phone I had been holding onto must've flown somewhere when Joshua had grabbed me. Soon, the rash spread all over my body. My face had swollen up from the reaction, and I could barely see through my eyes. Not to mention, breathing became difficult too. If I couldn't escape, I would die in the storage room. As I searched for something to break the lock, I finally spotted my phone that had been tossed to the corner. Overjoyed, I picked it up with trembling hands. However, neither my parents, my brother, nor Joel answered my calls.