Author: chiendeptrai

Part 1: The Scarred Secret and the Siren’s Echo   Sixteen-year-old Anna Miller had always believed her father, David Miller, was the kindest man in the quiet suburban town of Springfield, Illinois. Her mother had passed away when she was very young, so it had always been just the two of them. David worked all…

Part 1 That afternoon, the wind had teeth. It was the kind of cold that found its way through the seams of your jacket, a bitter reminder that fall in Chicago wasn’t always gentle. I was just trying to find a quiet moment. Between the two jobs I was working to keep my head above…

Part 1   The National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. is not a place for ghosts. It’s a place for polished brass, for crisp, dark-blue uniforms weighed down by medals, for the clinking of champagne flutes and the bright, brittle laughter of women in diamonds. It’s a place for the living. And then there was…

Part 1 The buzz of the restaurant was a familiar drone. Friday night at The Harbor House. Clinking glasses, low chatter, the smell of garlic and old money. I was Emma Clarke, and this was my life: checking emails on my phone, pushing a piece of salmon around my plate, and waiting for the check…

Part 1   My name is Lana Cross, and I was 22 when my life ended and began in the same 48-hour window. It started with silence. The kind of quiet in a trauma unit that feels wrong, like the air is holding its breath. The evening shift that Tuesday was oddly still. As a…

The mountain doesn’t care if you’re lonely . It doesn’t care if your heart is a hollowed-out, frozen cavern where a family used to live. The snow falls all the same. The wind howls all the same. For five years, that wind was the only voice I knew. It was the only voice I could…

Part 1   The fog in San Diego that morning was a living thing. It rolled in off the Pacific, thick and heavy, tasting of salt, rust, and the kind of cold that seeps right into your bones. It was a perfect shroud, clinging to the gray hulls of the destroyers sleeping in the harbor,…