Author: Kristin Stones

Earlier that day, a visitor came to her desk asking where to find a patient, though the only information they had was the first two digits of a room number someone had given them. She started looking the patient up to verify their actual location and check for any security or privacy restrictions before directing…

Her grandmother had passed away the year before and left her a handwritten recipe book, an old binder filled with stained pages, personal notes, and small adjustments made over years of cooking. It wasn’t worth anything in a monetary sense, but it carried real sentimental weight as one of the few tangible things she had…

A friend had asked her the day before whether she could babysit her toddler as a favor, and she’d agreed despite what that actually meant logistically, waking up at 5:45 in the morning and making a 45 minute round trip to get to the apartment. Once there, she ended up watching the child for a…

For about a year and a half, she’d been dealing with a rotating group of eight to ten kids, ranging from toddlers to teenagers, treating her 75 foot driveway as part of their regular play area. The core group belonged to neighbors with four or five kids of their own, but the numbers swelled regularly…

She and her partner were less than two weeks out from closing on a house, a process that had already been more frustrating than expected because of ongoing issues with their realtor. Things had started off reasonably well, and even though this realtor hadn’t been their first choice, she’d ended up being the one they…

She’d worked for the company since 2021, fully remote the entire time, and had never once met either the current owner or his wife in person. The business had been sold the previous year, and since then things had unraveled quickly under the new ownership. The owner had put his wife in charge of day…

He was 16, only on his second Saturday working the iced coffee stand at his city’s farmers market, when a woman came up around 10:30 a.m., ordered a coffee, and then asked to buy one of the one gallon jugs of their most popular flavor. The stand did sell gallon jugs to customers, but those…

She was hosting a casual holiday gathering to watch the World Cup, food and drinks included, with everyone attending expected to bring something to share so the group could all eat together. One of her friends, going by Jane, was currently unemployed, though her boyfriend, who was coming along as her guest, did have a…

He’d completed more than 7,000 deliveries as a driver at this point, enough that he’d seen just about everything the job could throw at him. So it stood out when he accepted an order, drove to the pickup address, and found what looked like a woman running a full food business out of her apartment,…

He lived in a neighborhood that had always felt safe enough that most residents, himself included, had never bothered installing security cameras. That sense of safety had been chipping away recently though, since packages had started disappearing off porches throughout the area, a problem that hadn’t really existed there before. He did welding as a…