See a story before you send one to Greg

The dining room of the Flamingo Club smelled, as it always did on luncheon days, of gardenias and mild social anxiety. The gardenias came from three enormous arrangements near the windows. The anxiety came from everywhere else.

Bonnie had been a member for eleven years, long enough to know which tables carried status and which carried drafts from the kitchen. She had a table near the east window, a cup of consommé she hadn’t touched yet, and an unobstructed view of practically everything.

Victoria Amarante Carrington’s bracelet, the one the society columns had described as descended from Austrian nobility, was no longer on Victoria’s wrist. It had been there during the welcome remarks. Bonnie was certain of it. Now Victoria’s wrist was bare, and Victoria herself was very carefully not looking at it.

This is where your recipient’s story begins. From here, every choice they make uncovers more of the world, the people, and the secret at the heart of it.

The flight from Washington was the long kind, the kind with a meal in the middle and a second one threatened later, and somewhere over the dark water it had reached the hour when the cabin lights go down and everyone privately negotiates with sleep. Daniel did not sleep on planes. Instead he had spent the past three patient hours developing a thorough and well-evidenced opinion about the man in seat 14C.

14C had ordered a water and not touched it. He had not slept, had not opened his screen, and kept one foot pressed against the soft leather bag under the seat ahead of him, the way you keep a hand on a sleeping child in a moving car.

Another man, three rows up, rose for the lavatory, and as he drew level with 14C his phone was already in his hand, low against his hip, angled. It was not the angle of a man reading a message. It was the angle of a phone held to catch what was in front of it, and what was in front of it was the back of 14C’s head.

This is where your recipient’s story begins. From here, every choice they make uncovers more of the world, the people, and the secret at the heart of it.

The survey schooner Perseverance had been named, its captain liked to say, for a virtue rather than an expectation, which was the honest way to name a boat. To Eleanor, standing on its deck for the first time on a gray Astoria morning with a satchel over one shoulder, it looked like exactly the kind of small, serious, unglamorous vessel a person might board in order to be somewhere other than where they had been. Which was, as it happened, the entire reason Eleanor had come.

Aldous Vane was the finest coastal cartographer on the western seaboard, and he was aware of this in the way that people are aware of facts they have stopped needing to verify. The position of assistant had gone to Eleanor not as Vane’s first choice, his second choice, or, if he was being precise about it, any choice he had been consulted about. He had received the notification by post, read it twice, and written back a letter of objection that was, by any measure, thorough. They had sent a polite acknowledgment and Eleanor anyway.

Vane looked at her over the railing and said, “You’re late.” “The tide was against me,” Eleanor said. “The tide,” said Vane, “does not consult your schedule. That is the first thing you will need to understand about this work.”

The work settled into a rhythm of soundings and angles, and Eleanor was good at it, good enough that Vane had stopped calling her “the Authority’s person.” Which was why the sketch caught her eye. An inlet, drawn carefully in his private notebook, detailed and complete, except that the official coastal profile for that same stretch showed solid cliff. Two miles of sheltered water on one page. A wall of rock on the other. When she mentioned it, his hand paused for just a fraction of a second before he took the rule from her.

This is where your recipient’s story begins. From here, every choice they make uncovers more of the world, the people, and the secret at the heart of it.

Henry had lived on Calder Street for nine years, long enough to know that nothing of consequence ever arrived before ten in the morning, which was precisely why the doorbell at eight forty-three on a Saturday felt less like a sound than an accusation.

He opened the door to a young man holding a cake. It was not a modest cake. It was three tiers of pale buttercream the color of good stationery, finished with a ribbon of deeper gold, and across the front, in a confident hand that had clearly been paid for, it said: Happy 50th, You Old Liar.

Henry looked at the cake. The cake, in its way, looked back. “This is fourteen Calder Street,” he said, “but this cake is not mine. I don’t know whose fiftieth this is, but it is decidedly not mine, and I have never in my life been called a liar on a cake.” But the young man’s van was already pulling away from the curb. So now Henry had a cake.

This is where your recipient’s story begins. From here, every choice they make uncovers more of the world, the people, and the secret at the heart of it.

The town of Caddwick Point had the particular quality of a place that had recently decided to take a rest. The ice cream shop was shuttered. The kayak rental had a hand-lettered sign in the window that said BACK IN MAY, as though May were a person expected shortly. Claire had driven up from Boston in just under three hours, which was about two hours and fifty minutes longer than she had needed to think about what she intended to do.

The letter had arrived on a Tuesday. Handwritten, a pale gray card inside a plain envelope, no return address. Inside, four sentences. There are things that should have reached you a long time ago. They didn’t, and that was my fault, not yours. I’ve left what I can at Caddwick Point. I think you’ll understand when you get there. Signed, simply: Marisol.

Marisol Vega had been, for the better part of twenty years, the person who knew Claire best and Claire the person who knew Marisol best, which is a particular kind of friendship and not an easy one to replace. She had a gift, when she chose to use it, for saying the true thing at the moment it would do the most damage. Claire had not heard from her in seven years. And now a card, four sentences, and an address.

The note at the inn had sent her to the lighthouse, and the envelope was waiting exactly where it said it would be, tucked in the gate post by someone who had been told precisely where to leave it. She was still holding it, unopened, when she realized she wasn’t alone. A man sat on the flat rocks nearby, a sketchbook open on his knee. Not waiting, exactly. But not surprised by her either.

This is where your recipient’s story begins. From here, every choice they make uncovers more of the world, the people, and the secret at the heart of it.

James had been in Monaco for eighteen hours and had already formed an opinion, which was that the place was exactly what it appeared to be, and that this was the most unsettling thing a place could be.

A great-aunt had left him a trip in her will, and James had accepted it in the spirit in which he accepted most pleasant things, which was without examining it too closely. Sun. Coast. A week of nothing required of him. The envelope at the front desk had not been part of the plan. It had been left, the clerk explained, by a woman who had checked out that morning, paid in cash, and instructed that it go to the next guest under the reservation.

James opened it standing in the lobby. Inside was a single card, three lines in a hurried, slightly slanted hand. The Rossetti letter is real. It’s been found. Someone else knows. Take the 11:42 to Ventimiglia. Change for the Cinque Terre. I’ll find you. — C

He took the 11:42. Two seats ahead, a woman who had boarded at the last moment sat watching the coast with the concentrated attention of someone thinking rather than sightseeing. She turned once. For a moment their eyes met. Then the train went into a tunnel.

This is where your recipient’s story begins. From here, every choice they make uncovers more of the world, the people, and the secret at the heart of it.