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The Glimpse Trade (A Silas Sharp Metaphysical Mystery): Chapter 20

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  Chapter 20 — The Philosophy War You’d think a metaphysical detective like me would have a profound concept of time. How it works. Is it real or a construct? The truth is I don’t care. Never have. I’ve seen time played with enough to know it’s a helluva lot more than clocks and calendars. Avery Bloom had been sold a way to manipulate time to suit her own purposes. And while I’m not a guy with a philosophy of time itself, I know that manipulating it doesn’t help anyone. That’s why I needed to talk to The Archivist again. “Mr. Sharp,” he said. “You know, if you’d just let me sell you a glimpse of our little conversations, you’d never need to visit.” “Maybe I like your company,” I said. “But let’s talk about selling glimpses.” I didn’t sit. He did. That felt intentional. “You’ve been busy,” I said. “City’s starting to echo.” “Yes.” “You’re hedging people,” I said. “Smoothing them out. Removing volatility.” “I’m showing them patterns,” he said. “What they do with that is their choice....
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The Glimpse Trade (A Silas Sharp Metaphysical Mystery): Chapter 19

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  Day 19 — The Cost Revealed Avery Bloom did mornings like a performance review. Careful lighting. Meticulous angles. My mornings are all chaos and dread. Avery does a version of morning that behaves itself. I stood across the street with a coffee that had ambitions but no follow-through and watched her apartment building reflect the kind of sunlight that made people believe in curated lives. Marcy met me in the lobby. She looked like she hadn’t slept, which meant Avery had. “That comment section is a war zone,” she said, not slowing down as she passed me. “I had to delete seventeen things before breakfast. One of them was just a shrug emoji. Do you know how aggressive a shrug can be?” “I’ve seen worse,” I said. “Once had a guy threaten me with a semicolon.” “That tracks,” she muttered. “Come on. She’s… off.” “Define off.” Marcy hit the elevator button like she wanted to fight it. “She posted a video at 7:02. Took it down at 7:04. Cried at 7:06. Asked me if we could legally sue som...
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The Glimpse Trade (A Silas Sharp Metaphysical Mystery): Chapter 18

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  Chapter 18 — Silas Tempted The card had weight to it. Not literal weight. It wasn’t heavy in the hand. Cheap cardstock, if anything. The kind of thing you’d expect to advertise half-off tax prep or a free consultation for a smoothie diet that costs you your sense of self. But it sat in my pocket like a brick.I’d taken it out twice already. Once to confirm it was still there. Once to make sure the number hadn’t changed. I’ve worked cases where numbers do that. Not often, but enough to make you suspicious of anything that stays the same too long. The office was quiet in the way January quiet gets even though it was mid-March. That stripped down quiet after the world had taken down its decorations and forgotten to put anything back. Outside, snow moved sideways past the window. One of those snows brought on by winter’s last gasp. The alley looked like it had given up on being a place people went. The dumpster leaned like it was suddenly casual. I turned the card over in my fingers. ...
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The Glimpse Trade (A Silas Sharp Metaphysical Mystery): Chapter 17

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  Chapter 17 — Probability Echoes By the time a city starts acting strange, the strange part is usually long over. That’s one of the first things you learn in my line of work. Hauntings don’t begin with chains rattling in the attic. Curses don’t start with blood on the wallpaper. They start smaller. A hesitation or a repeated coincidence. Could be a pattern so mild it can still pass for bad timing if you don’t look at it too hard. The city was having that kind of day. I noticed it before breakfast and hated that for me. I was sitting in my usual booth at The Perpetual Egg Diner hunkered over A Cup of Joe. Out the window and across the street, a man in a navy pea coat stood outside a florist on Wabash holding a ring box in one hand and his future in the other. He checked his phone. Put the box in his pocket. Took it back out. Put it away again. I watched him through the diner window while Joe steamed in front of me like he was disappointed in the whole species. “He’s been standing t...
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The Glimpse Trade (A Silas Sharp Mystery): Chapter 16

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  Chapter 16 — The Therapist’s Dilemma Dr. Calico Verde had a rule she didn’t tell patients about. It wasn’t in any textbook. It wasn’t taught in graduate school. It was something she learned after years of listening to people explain themselves. Real pain is messy. Real trauma wanders. It contradicts itself. It doubles back and argues with its own memory. But rehearsed pain? Rehearsed pain is tidy. Verde sat at her desk with Avery Bloom’s session transcripts spread in front of her like a deck of cards that refused to shuffle. She read them again. Then again. Every time Avery described a difficult moment—an argument, a betrayal, a panic episode—the language was the same. The structure was the same. The emotional beats landed in identical places. There were pauses. But they were the right pauses. There were tears. But they arrived at the right sentences. It felt less like therapy and more like watching someone perform a monologue they’d practiced in the mirror. Verde leaned back i...
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The Glimpse Trade (A Silas Sharp Metaphysical Mystery): Chapter 15

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  Chapter 15 — The Trader’s Past The actuary lived in a building that had once been a bank. You could still see it in the bones. Tall ceilings. Marble floors. Windows that suggested confidence in the future. The kind of place built by men who believed numbers would always behave themselves if you showed them enough respect. Now it held three private trading offices, a tax attorney, and a Pilates studio that smelled like eucalyptus and ambition. I took the elevator to the fourth floor. His office door was open. The man inside didn’t look up when I walked in. Screens glowed across one wall. Markets moving in slow, restless tides. Red, green, yellow. The colors of modern anxiety. He was typing. Not frantically. Calmly. Someone who understood that panic was just volatility wearing sweatpants. “You’re early,” he said. “I didn’t know we had an appointment.” “We did.” “When?” “Yesterday.” I leaned against the doorframe. “And I declined it?” “Something like that.” He finished typing, hit e...
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