Excerpt from Pool House by Mary Choi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Her watch pulses again.

Moon: FaceTime Video.

OK, so Moon is alive. Her mother disconnects. Then repeats the process as cortisol surges through Stevie's system with unremitting rigor, her body still convinced that they're calling about Moon's cornea and heart. They would not want her liver. Stevie exhales as slow as she can, the air hissing out audibly as her hands fill single-use plastic condiment containers for a takeout order. But the small satisfaction of the snapping lids can't penetrate the exquisite and familiar rage traveling across her extremities. Another call thrums up her arm with a voice message that reads: Call me, it's urgent. Stevie shuts her eyes. Her outrage is so pure that her vision trembles.

MOON

Sitting in the driveway, Moon is vaguely aware she is in shock. Or that she might be. She's giddily impressed rather than sad, and while she's worried about this, what it says about her that excitement is the dominant feeling, she is also concerned by how convinced she is that if she called him right now, he would pick up. He would pick up because it was her.

But he's dead. She can't believe it. He's dead. It's incredible that he's dead. Mac. Her Mac, as the reporter had described him on the phone. She hadn't cried on the call, but she cries now. It's unfathomable. There's no official press yet. Corinna, Mac's wife, has issued a statement on social media, but that's it. No details beyond respecting the family's privacy during this difficult time. There's no cause of death circulating, but Moon knows. The reporter had a source at Port Police. They're holding the identity of the body until they can tell his elderly mother somewhere in the Outer Hebrides. There is no suspicion of foul play. There were eyewitnesses. And a bridge.

Sweating in her baking car, an old thrill rumbles through her body. The intrigue of arriving change. Moon has instincts around this like animals in apocalypse films. Something is coming. She's almost glad she skipped her AA meeting, choosing instead to wander around the Grove in the stifling afternoon, the festiveness of the outdoor mall reliably depressing in a way that recalls Christmas in the wrong season, reminding her of Texas. She wouldn't have taken the call if she'd been in her meeting, upstairs in the community room of the Farmers Market, so this feels fated somehow.

She wipes her lipstick on the back of her hand; it leaves a garish, greasy smear. She remembers swimming in Lake Lucerne. Mac cannonballing. Bobbing up, laughing, spitting water out in an arc like an angel pissing in a fountain. How he'd declared the water delicious, tasting like fucking Volvic. The tug of his arms pulling her into his lap. The way he'd frolic in the room after sex to make her laugh, fat and sublimely confident, arms raised, flaccid penis dangling. The look of him cleaning. Always cleaning. Listening to the Stone Roses. The smell of him. The skin at his temple, the scent of uncooked rice. The nightly drone-hiss of the CPAP machine that he kept hidden even from his staff.

None of it makes sense. She blows her nose on a crumpled napkin and pulls out her phone before she realizes. Again, she's thinking to call him. She wants to gossip about what she's heard. She wants to hear him laugh about it. She wants to resume being angry at him instead of heavy and sad and regretful.

She gets out of the car, passing the mailbox and the front door of the house, proceeding through the white, mechanized side gate, and thinks back to a decade ago. A near-miss. The small heart attack that they'd referred to as mini and then the bigger one that should have taken him out. They'd reconciled then. Again. The fourth time. Fifth. It didn't matter. But he'd looked diminished and exhausted in the hospital bed. Properly old to her for the first time until his eyes snapped open and he grabbed her by the waist to ransack her bag for cigarettes.

Excerpted from Pool House by Mary Choi. Copyright © 2026 by Mary Choi. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.