Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 26 short novels in Regret
I remember the first secret like it was a small stone in my pocket. "My name is Emma," I said once, when I was five and too proud to cry for very long. "Emma?" Grandma laughed and kissed my nose. "Such a neat name. Our little secret is safe." "Secret?" I blinked. "What secret?" "You're mommy and daddy's little secret," she said, very soft, like she was tucking a blanket over the word. I never asked why after that. Secrets were like the rabbit I slept with—small, warm, and carrying the...
I never meant to make anyone a lesson. I only wanted my life back. "I don't want to see Miles again," I told my friends the night we signed the papers. They laughed and raised their glasses. "Good. Burn bridges," Emmett said, clapping his hand against mine. Ten days later, at a private party for friends, I saw him. Of course I did. The circles overlap in this town like two tapes woven too tight. I wasn't drunk that night; I kept my hands to myself and my tone polite. "Miles," I said...
I woke with the taste of someone else's breath still warm on my tongue and a name like a secret pressed against my ribs. "Rafael… mine," I whispered to the empty air and surprised myself with how steady it sounded. A knock at the door dragged me back into the shabby little desk, the thin mattress, the small life I'd borrowed for a week. I blinked the dream away and found my palms sweaty and my cheeks wet with tears I hadn't known I cried. I sat up, wrapped my school uniform tighter around my...
I came back on the hottest day of the year and the sky hated me for it. “I’m soaked,” I said, standing in the elevator lobby, my suitcase wheels puffing steam. “Of course I’m soaked.” A man in black opened the stairwell door and the rain punched the corridor into a waterfall. He stepped out like he owned the storm. He had a cigarette between his teeth and a corner-of-the-mouth smile that used to be mine and his. “Harrison?” I heard myself say before my brain stopped working. He...
I am a woman who loved until her love became hunger. "I am Harriet," I say to myself in the dark, and the name tastes like a promise I once made and later broke. "You always said you wanted him to be yours, Harriet," my mother told me once. "Do not be ashamed. Use what you have." "Use what I have?" I asked. "Yes," she said. "You are a daughter of rank. You know how to take." "Do you think I did not try?" I whispered. "You did," she answered. "Too much." My voice is the...
"I'll be back late," Hayes said as he dropped the little box on the table and walked out. I opened it with shaking hands. Inside, a bracelet lay there. The same style I had worn every day since he first tied those beads for me three years ago. "Did you buy this tonight?" I asked, my voice small. "Replace the old one," he said without looking. "It looked worn." He walked away like that every night lately—business calls, red carpets, other people's arms. I put the bracelet aside...
I am Lucia Petrov. "I wasn't always Lucia," I started telling people once, and they would look at me like it was a neat little origin to file away. "My mother wanted me to be Lucia," she used to say with a half-smile, "because she liked the sound of it. My father thought 'Lucy' was better. He changed it, like he changed everything he could." "Why would he care so much about a name?" my friend Ernesto Hawkins asked once. He was always blunt. "Because he liked orders," I answered. "He...
"Footsteps stopped just below my eyes." I looked up. A pair of polished shoes, then a tall shadow filled the doorway. "Amaya, are you hurt?" Valentina's agent, Claire, said before I could. Her voice had that practiced care actors use for cameras. "I—" I tried to answer, my throat dry. "I didn't mean to. Do you believe me?" Jaxson Thomas didn't move. He stood like a statue, suit sharp, face colder than the clinic lights. "How is she?" he asked finally. "Her palms are cut. The...
“I don’t want the house. I want the last two months to be calm.” I said it like a fact, like ordering a cup of tea. “Calm?” Callahan Carvalho laughed and put his hand on the piano lid. “You say calm and then you glue yourself to every little thing that can go wrong.” I closed my eyes. “We agreed to keep the year polite. No scenes. No shouting in front of the parents. Buy-and-sell done after New Year.” “You sound like a lawyer,” he said. “Not my wife.” “You sound like a man who...
I sit in the corner and drink my soda. "I said no more wine," Annie whispers beside me, but I keep my cup close to my lips. The room is loud. Laughter and small screams swirl like confetti. My face is calm. My heart is not. "Are you sure you want to stay?" Annie asks again. "I said yes," I answer. "I can last one hour." Annie squeezes my hand, then turns to wave at someone across the room. Three men walk in like they own the night. Heads turn. Phones lift. The loud cheers feel...
I pressed my back to the cold bathroom tile and stared at the stick in my hand. "It’s positive," I whispered to myself, and the word felt too loud in the tiny room. Adrian Carter's car keys clattered in the hall. I shoved the test into the trash, tried to smooth my face, and walked out. He stood in the doorway with his coat on, hair still damp, eyes flat as winter glass. "You're home early," I said. "Don't touch my briefcase." He stepped back and his voice clipped. "And don't...
"I’m at the hospital," I said, my hand pressed to the roundness of my belly. There was a long, thin silence on the other end. Then Luciano’s voice came back, cool and small, like a shard. "Did you get it done?" "No," I whispered. "They say it's dangerous. The doctor wants me to wait." "Then we are divorced," he said. The words dropped like ice. I stared at the ultrasound printout in my fist. The curve of it was proof and proofless at once. "Why must it be divorce?" I asked. My...
“I can’t keep taking care of you,” I said, and my voice broke on the last word. Rene Hart didn’t move. He stood at the door in his suit like a man made of glass. “You knew where to find me,” he said, flat and small. “I don’t want anything from you,” I lied. “Just—promise you’ll check on Grandma sometimes. Promise you won’t leave her.” My fingers cramped around the paper in my pocket. “There’s an empty plot next to her. I paid for it. If you ever visit—” “Enough.” He cut me off, and the...
It was one in the morning when Denver sent me the link. "This yours?" his message read. The link opened like a small black doorway: an anonymous post, titled "When Did You Know the Other Person Didn't Love You?" My thumb hovered. My heart ran to my throat. I typed one word and sent it: "Yes." There was a pause, the kind of pause that feels heavier than a reply. Then his reply came. "Then let's break up." I stared at my phone. I wanted to answer "Fine" so I could leave with some...
"I think we should break up." Those five words arrived on my phone like a gust of wind through a cracked window. They were typed by Sijia, the man who once wrote essays about constellations on napkins and called them our future. "Why?" I typed, because his being tidy with endings felt like an insult. "He said, 'Our personalities don't match.'" "Don't match." I said it aloud once, then again, and it tasted like a clean and incontrovertible excuse. I had been practicing how to untie a...
I woke up to kids laughing downstairs and thought I had overslept for work. "Mom, it's snowing," I said into the phone two hours later, holding the screen to show the yard. "Chloe, it's Saturday," my mother said, smiling into the little lit square. "I know. But look—it's snow." She laughed. "Don't stand out there barefoot. Come in. You'll catch a cold." I opened the sliding door and stepped into the white. The snow lay like a blanket over the little yard—over the pots, the stone...
"I remember the blue dress," I said before I could stop myself. "You bought it the day you saw him," Jazlynn replied, a small, warm laugh in her voice. "You stood in the fitting room like a kid." "I know," I said. "But he was supposed to be my life story, not a footnote." When people met me now, they saw a stable life: a steady job as a doctor, a neat home, a son named Eli Clement, and in-laws who smiled in public. What they didn't see was how that neat life had been eaten away,...
“You’re not the lead,” he said. I blinked. The room felt cold in a way that had nothing to do with the air conditioner. My name is Dani Richards. I am a writer who woke up living a life I had read before. I knew the plot, the turns, who loved who. I also knew one brutal fact: in that book, the man I loved — my small-uncle, Gaspard Wright — ended up with someone else. He loved the other woman. I thought that knowing would save me. “Gaspard,” I said. “You promised.” He looked at me as if...
"I want a divorce." "Why now?" Franklin Craig asked like the words were a cold measurement he couldn't accept. He stood in the living room with his hands folded, the same posture he took when negotiating a client. The sunlight slid across the floor and did nothing to warm him. "It doesn't feel right anymore," I said, and meant it the way you mean a bruise you no longer want to press at. I had given ten years to a life with him. That sounded like a small fortune until it stopped buying...
“I spat blood.” “Elora, what are you doing?” Mina’s voice broke the snow and my ribs. “I’m done waiting, Nicolas.” I tasted metal and the words came out like a vow. “Nine lives. Nine times. I’m done.” Mina knelt, trembling. “Miss—don’t say that.” I laughed without joy. “Do you know what it is to stitch a wedding dress with your own hands while your heart sews itself to a man who does not love you?” My fingers were numb from the needle. “Do you know what it is to let him go eight...
