What if things happened to you—special, magic things—because you’d been preparing for them?

Sometimes what a person needs most is to be forgiven.

Phoebe realized how very wrong she’d been about this house, this family. It was far darker, more dangerous than the places she’d grown up in. In the dingy little apartments her mother rented, everything was...

I’ve lived here … my whole life. It’s where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil, and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also...

Marriage is full of such cut-and-dry arrangements, Rhonda thought,then felt that small ache she sometimes got at the back of her skull-the one that told her she might be alone forever, not a fate that...

Classical Revival,” he said. It was yet another display of his seemingly unending knowledge that both made her proud and made her feel very small. Maybe if she had gone to college she would have...

Storytelling wasn’t about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.

The world was full of dangers now that she was pregnant: mercury in tuna, hot tubs, beer, secondhand smoke, over-the-counter medicine. Not to mention crazy baby-abducting fairy kings.

Oh my God!” Sam said again, his voice shaking. I’ve given birth to something inhuman, Phoebe thought. A lamprey with row after row of teeth.

And as Rhonda told the story, she thought: this is how the past gets passed down. This is how memories are made. Half-invented, embellished, given a touch of whimsy. Daniel would be a saint now...

The thing that drew them to her was the thing that had made all of them come to Sexton in the first place: they were all outsiders, people on the fringe. And no one, it...