The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

“There are rules.”

She leans over Adeline, casting her in shadow. “And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”

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.

Her future will rush by the same as her past, only worse, because there will be no freedom, only a marriage bed and a deathbed and perhaps a childbed between, and when she dies it will be as though she never lived.

attraction can look an awful lot like recognition in the wrong light.

She will never forget, though she’ll wish she could.

it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does.

She smiles, and Henry’s world goes brighter. She turns away, and it is dark again.

Barbie and Ken vibes.

(one night, soon, he will take the thing apart, and find the body empty of cogs, empty of anything to explain the creeping forward motion).

Fifty years, and she is still learning the shape of her curse. She cannot make a thing, but she can use it. She cannot break a thing, but she can steal it. She cannot start a fire, but she can keep it going.

I do wish you’d make up your mind.” A shadow sweeps across his face. “Trust me, my dear, you don’t.”

“Do not mistake this—any of it—for kindness, Adeline.” His eyes go bright with mischief. “I simply want to be the one who breaks you.”

And perhaps it is just that happiness is frightening.

His edges blur into shadow, his skin the color of moonlight, his eyes the exact shade of the moss behind him. He is wild. But so is she.

It is not, of course, and later, she will know the truth, and she will wish she’d asked, wish she’d pressed, wish she’d known.

History is a thing designed in retrospect.

“I love you too,” she says. She wants it to be true.

And this, he decides, is what a good-bye should be. Not a period, but an ellipsis, a statement trailing off, until someone is there to pick it up. It is a door left open. It is drifting off to sleep.

This is the last gift she can give him, these moments he will never have. And this is the last gift he can give her, the listening.

before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.

present, and only the present, it is a run-on sentence. And Henry was a perfect pause in the story.

She marvels, that in the same amount of time, he never learned to read her own.

cunning, or her cleverness, never learned to read the nuances of her actions, the subtle rhythms of her speech.