The receptionist buzzed my office and said there was a man in the lobby who wouldn’t give his name, only that I fed his family once at a Flying J in Missouri. I hadn’t thought about that night in fourteen years. I told her to send him back. My name is Claire Whitaker. I’m forty-three,…
The morning they told me I had two weeks left at the diner, I was sixty-three years old and counting quarters in the parking lot to make sure I had enough gas to get home. I’d worked at Ruby’s Diner off Route 30 in western Pennsylvania for twenty-six years. I started the week my daughter…
My name is Eleanor. I’ve been reborn — reborn back into 1977, on the very day the government announced the expansion of the national university entrance exam. In my last life, my mother forced me to marry in my sister’s place: a lame, drunken mechanic from Yorkshire. I used my own two hands to fix…
The first time I met Delia Hatcher, I hadn’t eaten in two days and I was sitting in her booth trying to figure out how to walk out without ordering anything. It was February 1998. A Tuesday. The diner was called Marlow’s, off Route 30 outside Latrobe, Pennsylvania. I was nineteen years old and I…
The Zillow listing for my mother’s house went live on a Tuesday morning while I was making her oatmeal. I recognized the front porch before I read the address. The blue rocking chair. The wind chime my dad hung the summer before he died. The crooked “1847” my mother had painted on the mailbox herself…
When my biological parents wanted to take me away, my first reaction was: What about Vincent? He had just lost his memory, forgotten everything, and only remembered me. I was planning to take him with me, But I unexpectedly overheard him talking to someone else: “Amnesia? I’m faking it.” “I offended someone and didn’t want…
The lawyer said the buyer wanted to meet me in person before signing the papers. I told him no. I’d already signed away enough of my life that week — the tractor, the two remaining cows, the tools my grandfather had hung on the barn wall in the exact same order since 1962. I didn’t…
The vote to remove me from my own company took forty-two seconds. I timed it on the clock above the conference room door because I couldn’t bring myself to look at the six people sitting around the table I’d bought at an estate sale in Cedar Rapids nine years ago. Marcus made the motion. Of…
The man standing at the end of the aisle wasn’t Daniel. I only realized it three seconds before I was supposed to say “I do.” Let me back up. Eleven years ago, I was twenty-four years old, standing in a bridal suite at St. Mark’s in Cedar Falls, Iowa, waiting for a wedding that never…
I had known Duke Maximilian for over ten years. But on the day my identity as the fake daughter was exposed, and I was unceremoniously kicked out of the Count’s manor, he was leisurely attending the welcome banquet for the true daughter. The man who had always been cold and indifferent was unbelievably gentle and…
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