: Am I providing enough information to keep the reader gripped? This is the opening of a short story I'm writing (second draft): A deep silence enveloped the room as the words escaped from

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I'm less dismayed by the lack of sensory details than I am the disagrement within the details you did provide.

A deep silence enveloped the room as the words escaped from my mouth.

This implies that the silence enveloped the room while you were speaking, as if you were suddenly placed under a cone of silence and couldn't complete the phrase. Some split in the time would be nice.

She was staring vacantly at the ceiling, with eyes that didn't reflect disgust, shock, nor anger. None of the reactions that I had expected.

You should use "or" there, not "nor". Perhaps:

... with eyes that reflected neither disgust, shock, nor anger. Not one of the reactions I had expected.

I could see "None of " were it a grammatical quirk, but it feels flat to me.

Maybe what I was looking at...

Be definitive in your subjective opinion. "It was as if" is better than "Maybe", here.

You could try trimming some of the subjective interpretation, and instead add an image to enforce how sudden the silence is. You could hear a heartbeat, or the echo of your own words, or, if you want to improve your flow, you could hear the wife's breathing, and tie that into her mood.

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I wanted sensory details in the first few paragraphs. I had no idea what kind of room the characters were in. At first I thought it was some kind of operating theater, where some kind of weird procedure would happen--the MC on one operating table, and Akiko on another. When I learned that it was their bedroom, I felt jarred. I had to re-imagine what I was looking at.

So: More sensory details.

As for keeping secrets from the reader: That's hard to do in first person. In order to play fair with the reader, you must say what's on the character's mind.

Another way of saying this: In order to hide something from the reader, you must arrange for the character not to think about it.

In any novel, I'll allow you exactly one occurrence of "And then I knew what I had to do," without revealing the plan. Or one occurrence of "And then I knew who the killer was," without revealing the killer. And in each case, you have to do a chapter break or a scene break and jump forward in time. Otherwise the character will think about the plan or the killer, and you'll have to tell us.

But you can't make it a habit, or I'll yell at your book. I'll say truly horrible things and your book will feel bad. Just ask any of Dan Brown's books how mean I can be.

I have a theory that most of the things an author wants to hide from the reader aren't really worth hiding. And that any time you try to hide information by jumping to abstraction ("What he saw next made his blood ran cold"), you're cheating. Give us whatever sensory details the character is experiencing. Give us the character's thoughts. Play fair.

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