There is a notebook I keep meaning to throw away.
It's the soft-cover kind, the ones that bend when you hold them, with a coffee ring on
the front cover that I cannot explain because I don't remember the morning that made it.
Inside: six pages of a story I started when I was twenty-three. A man with a particular
quality of stillness. A woman who studied him from across a conference table and felt,
for the first time in her professional life, that she could not read what she was looking
at. Six pages and then nothing — because I knew what happened next, and the knowing
frightened me.
That unfinished story became "The Audit," which is the first story in What I Left Burning.
The collection began the way a lot of my work begins: with a feeling I couldn't fully name
but couldn't stop circling. In this case the feeling was about a specific kind of situation —
the professional encounter where desire enters through the exact door that was supposed to
keep it out. The contract that creates proximity. The commission that creates trust. The
expertise that creates intimacy before either person has decided to be intimate.
I've always found this more interesting than love that arrives conveniently. There's
something more honest about desire that shows up in the wrong place — that requires the
person feeling it to account for it, to weigh it against something real. The women in these
five stories are not reckless. They are, if anything, too careful. They see the risk exactly.
They measure it against everything they have built. And then they make a choice that isn't
easy to justify on paper, which is precisely the choice I wanted to write.
I had versions of all five of them before I had the language to finish them. Not drafts —
more like emotional facts I kept revisiting: an auditor who cannot read the man she is
investigating, a conservator who stays on a job she knows is compromised, an interpreter
who withholds one line from the official record. I knew what these women wanted. I knew
what they were risking. What I didn't know, for years, was how to write the resolution
without making it smaller than the situation deserved.
What I finally understood is that the resolution doesn't need to be large. It needs to be
honest. These stories end where they end — not at the moment everything is declared, but
at the moment everything has already been decided, quietly, without a witness. That felt
true. That felt like the right place to stop.
What I Left Burning is available now on Amazon. It is short. You can read it in an
afternoon. And if you find, at the end of it, that you are thinking about which of the
five situations you would have handled differently — that's the question I wanted to
leave you with.
I'm glad these stories finally got finished. They were ready before I was.
