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

He wouldn't kill himself. He was too petty to allow his enemies to keep living, beating him, eating beautiful meals while he lay there, eyes sewn shut.

Moon knocks on her own kitchen door. She knocks again. It is the back door, or the side rather, glass-paneled and up a flight of stairs. The house is unoccupied but she wants to make sure. She plugs in the passcode and slips inside. The shades are up, the sun pools golden in the room, and as she hears the click of the central AC, she looks around her magnificent kitchen. It is incomprehensible to her that she won't get fucked up now. That she will have to do this sober.

She should call her sponsor, but instead she takes off her bra. Natori. And her pants. The Row. Thousand-dollar pants. She slings them over the back of a Danish leather bar stool by the marble counters that are spectacularly veined like a great wedge of Stilton. The room evokes words like hearth, biodynamic wine, and Marcella Hazan chicken, all those bougie white-people words. Southern Californian status words. She even has one of those brushed gold faucets on a jointed arm that juts out from the backsplash to fill pots for pasta. As if she eats fucking pasta.

She wonders what will happen next. Whether there will be press requests, and the old reptilian instincts kick in, what she will wear, glam, the expenses of getting a facial, Botox, RF microneedling. She may need to bleach her teeth. Whatever comes, she will have to lose weight. She wonders how this will have changed the course of her life in a month. A year. Ten.

She hates him for doing this to her, and in thinking this, she cries. That selfish fucker. He'd told her not to buy this house, she remembers now. All her money is in the house. He told her it wasn't prudent, his word, puckering his pretty little mouth in a flautist's embouchure. Prudent, prudent, prudent. A real naggy word. His accent furring the r's. She'd done it anyway. Possibly because he hadn't approved. The pain in her throat does a collapsing thing into her chest when she thinks of Corinna. She wonders how alone she must feel in that house in Malibu. Barely thirty. And then she's furious to be thinking protectively about Mac's new wife at all.

A bridge. Christ. She's surprised he'd had the balls. And then, unkindly, she imagines that final topple as an accident. A slip. An undignified little wobble with dancing, frantic hands. Or maybe he had meant it. The drama of it reeks of petulance. Wanting the world to know of his unhappiness. To wonder about it.

She checks the time, wanting Stevie. She wants warmth. A body. Even as she's distantly aware that she can no longer hold Stevie with abandon as she once had. She calls her daughter. FaceTimes. Calls again. Leaves a message. She circles the kitchen island, vision blurred with tears, running her fingers along the cool surface of the stone. She picks up a box of cauliflower-based snack cracker. Dairy, gluten, and tree-nut free according to the box and somehow costing twenty-two dollars.

There are other cues throughout the room that hint at a particular caste of lodger. The interlopers she despises. The details seem to glow in the kitchen that she doesn't always recognize as hers. The cheap citrus-scented reed diffusers from Home Goods, the gilded bowl filled with cashed vape cartridges. An abandoned bamboo matcha whisk that she will add to the others.

The last tenant's name had been Howie Yoo. She'd fallen into the obvious joke two weeks ago.

Howie Yoo, he'd said, hand held out.

Fine, Moon replied, annoyed.

She hates dealing with her patrons, these assholes that live in her house, these creatives and thought leaders that book the whole thing through an app for weeks, sometimes months, for thousands and thousands of dollars that now pay her mortgage.

A week ago, Howie had texted to see if she had any USB mics floating around, and annoyingly she did. She'd gone over with the whole IKEA bag of plastic Amazon'd flotsam that the others left behind. The waste of these digital nomads shocks her. Metric tons of plastic—Theraguns, ring lights, yoga mats, cables, milk frothers—all trailing in their wake.

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.