Every book starts somewhere. For Opera Alley, it starts with a sound.
A mail slot opening. An envelope on the floor. A name that belongs to someone the woman upstairs has been trying very hard to stop being.
I wrote the opening of this book probably forty times before it became what it is now. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to drop the reader directly into Evie’s world without preamble, no backstory, no setup, just the specific texture of a Monday afternoon in January in Tacoma and the moment everything she’s built starts to come undone. Getting that balance right, present and immediate without being confusing, took a long time.
What I kept coming back to was this: Evie is someone who has learned to read her environment the way other people read faces. Every sound in her building is catalogued. Every person she passes gets a quiet threat assessment. She has been living this way for fourteen months and she has almost convinced herself it’s normal. The opening needed to put the reader inside that hypervigilance before they understood why it existed.
Here’s where the book begins:
The mail slot flicked open at the foot of the stairs, the dull click of metal, the faint friction of envelope against wood as it landed. Evie heard it the way she heard everything in this building, every sound indexed and memorized before the first rent check cleared.
She went down the stairs barefoot, one hand trailing the rail.
The envelope sat on the entryway floor. Standard issue, white, cheap, a little battered at the corner. The kind you bought in a pack of fifty, not the kind you used for things that mattered. She bent to pick it up and saw her name on the front, block letters ruled carefully, each one standing alone:
EMILY NASH
Her breath stuttered. She had not been Emily Nash in fourteen months.
The rest of chapter one is available to read free when you sign up on the contact page. If Evie’s Monday afternoon sounds like somewhere you want to spend some time, I’d love to have you along for the rest of it.
Maren
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