The Book of Jonah by Joshua Max Feldman

when he’d come into the apartment and seen that Becky’s coworkers and friends-from-college had responded to the relative lack of available males by (as he’d often observed women do) getting especially drunk, he almost had some sympathy for himself—now firmly, firmly embedded in his relationship.
    Relationship or not, though, he could still party with those present, could still celebrate BBEC by getting drunk. He’d followed the Scotches at his apartment with a couple celebratory birthday shots with Becky when he’d first arrived, then had a few beers from the keg, and now he was working on a vodka tonic prepared by Aimee, the alcohol-to-mixer ratio of which also happened to be 2:1. She and Jonah were talking in her room—she was seated at her desk, showing him on her computer the food blog she wrote, trying to convince him to read it as he stood over her shoulder.
    â€œSee?” she said as the screen filled with a photograph of streaked crimson ice cream in a small paper cup. “This is from Wednesday. The rhubarb-and-anise ice cream from the Emilia’s truck in SoHo is the best in the city. You’d know that if you read my blog!”
    â€œI dunno, Aimee,” Jonah said mildly. “The McDonald’s on Forty-fifth Street makes a pretty good McFlurry. Maybe I should write a food blog.”
    â€œOh, come on,” she laughed, and tapped him gently on the leg from her chair—something she had been doing with increasing frequency, he’d noted. Though she was undeniably cute—Korean, pretty-faced, dressed insouciantly in a fedora and skirt—he concluded this touching was a permissible indulgence: maybe malum in se with regard to monogamy, but not necessarily malum prohibitum . “If you like fast food, you should at least stick to Shake Shack,” she continued. “I heard they’re going to open a new one near the new World Trade Center, or, like, whatever they’re going to call that now.” She started to type on the keyboard. “Here, let me show you something else.” He took another sip of his drink, drifted over to the photographs on her bookcase as she typed. “I’m actually really committed to all this,” she went on, in a slightly more serious tone. “A girl from my year at Barnard already has a book deal for her blog. Like, you can really make it happen.”
    â€œAll it takes is a blog and a dream,” he said, and she laughed.
    â€œI never knew lawyers were so funny!” she said.
    â€œYou should see me in court,” he answered, but now one of the photographs had caught his attention. It appeared to have been taken at a restaurant, as Aimee and the two other women in the image were seated at a white-clothed table. The woman to Aimee’s right was also Korean, resembled her, though she had a rounder face, wore glasses—Jonah figured this was her sister. But it was the third woman in the photo who interested him: thin, long-necked, and very pale, with a mass of jet-black hair. And though she smiled thinly, there was a certain eeriness, he thought, to her look.
    â€œThere’s this little organic place on Allen Street I’m doing a post on…” Aimee was saying.
    â€œWho’s this?” Jonah asked her, still looking at the picture.
    Aimee turned around in her chair. “Oh, that’s my sister, Milim. That’s randomly the only picture I have of us together. She’s a doctor now. My dad is obsessed with her, of course.”
    â€œNo,” Jonah said, and tapped the glass beside the face of the pale woman. “Who’s she?” He could not quite identify what he found so strange about her—which had the effect of making her appear all the stranger. Her nose was unusually large, she had a black mole that dotted the top of a cheekbone, but it was the look in her eyes, he eventually decided, that was so odd: hollow—ghostly—as if she stared