Koala Novels

Atlas Hale, principal of Hale Capital, the Hale heir, hasn't been photographed with a woman in three years. Endows a memorial chapel on East 74th. Sits the 7am pew alone. Spent a year at Eihei-ji at twenty-two and came home with his late mother's jade rosary on his left wrist. Now he's running an audition. One million dollars, the listing says, for a personal assistant. The only requirement: she has to look like the late Mrs. Hale. Within thirty-six hours, every eligible woman from the Beresford to Locust Valley has filed an application. What no one knows is that the wife he memorializes — the one whose Frick catalogue still lies open on his nightstand — is the wife whose ventilator line he closed himself.

The day before my Harvard enrollment-confirmation deadline, Margot Marlowe and I fell down the back stairs of the Marlowe Family Science Center. When I woke up, I was her. She woke up in my mildewed walk-up in Bridgeport, across from a drunk stepfather and a mother three weeks past her last dialysis copay. I woke up under a Venetian chandelier in Greenwich, with a framed Brown acceptance letter on the desk and a Harvard enrollment-deferral form already paper-clipped to a fresh Amex.

I was Silas Thorne's wife for two lifetimes. The first time, I stepped in front of a knife meant for him and died on a wet Connecticut road in November. The second time, I took the fall for him, did seven years in a federal women's prison in Danbury, and on the morning I was released he had me committed to a private Berkshires retreat called Hartwell Manor. The third time, I woke up at his birthday dinner.

My phone is buzzing on the slate countertop when I come back. Not back from anywhere. I'm standing in my own kitchen with a coffee that's still hot, and the date on the lock screen says January 26, and the last thing I remember is the stairwell concrete on my cheek and not being able to feel my hands anymore. The notifications stack themselves up while I watch. *Voss Family (5)*.

My fiancé dumped me the night before our engagement party. He married someone else four months later and mailed me a save-the-date. I needed a date. He had to be hot enough to make Jamie question his own gene pool. Expensive enough to make the room recalculate.

I'm the cohort joke at Wexler Med. Dr. Adrian Shaw teaches forensic pathology — Choate, Yale, untouchable. The man I've chased for three years and never landed. He has a girlfriend. Lindley Brannock. Everyone calls her Lindy. She's pretty in the Beacon Hill way, soft-voiced, old money. The girl I hate most in the world.