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No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she
would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
Never pray to the gods who answer after dark.
Adeline had wanted to be a tree. To grow wild and deep, belong to no one but the ground beneath her feet, and the sky above,
Across the room, a trio of dark shapes—men’s forms, in trousers and waistcoats and jackets. In the low light, their headless forms seem alive, leaning into one another as they study her. She considers the cut of their clothes, the absence of bone stays or bustled skirts, and thinks, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, how much simpler it would be to be a man, how easily they move through the world, and at such little cost.
Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you.
“Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”
People talk a lot about home. Home is where the heart is, they say. There’s no place like home. Too long away and you get homesick. Homesick—Henry knows that one is supposed to mean sick for home, not from it, but it still feels right. He loves his family, he does. He just doesn’t always like them. Doesn’t like who he is around them.
It was just so … permanent. Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?
They look at you and see whatever they want … Because they don’t see you at all.
“You can’t make people love you, Hen. If it’s not a choice, it isn’t real.”
He has asked the wrong god for the wrong thing, and now he is enough because he is nothing. He is perfect, because he isn’t there.
Memories are stiff, but thoughts are freer things. They throw out roots, they spread and tangle, and come untethered from their source. They are clever, and stubborn, and perhaps—perhaps—they are in reach.
“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”
That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.
