The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

she lay on her side, open-eyed and untroubled, humming to herself in the darkness; and sleep was a shadowy forgetful distance, a curling like smoke in abandoned attics and a singing like the sea in a pearly shell.

Edie did not trust doctors. In her experience they didn’t listen, preferring instead to strut around pretending that they had all the answers. They jumped to conclusions; they ignored what didn’t fit with their theories.

She’d learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.