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You’re too good-looking to be a writer, Helen immediately wants to say out loud. You didn’t have an awkward teen phase that forced you to develop a rich interior life to compensate.
Helen thinks she might be allergic to this room.
Helen tries to remind herself that her least favorite thing about herself is how much she cares about what other people think. And that they probably aren’t thinking about her anyway.
“You make things harder for yourself. You’re prickly and defensive when you don’t have to be.”
She could never quite shake the feeling that she wasn’t a particularly vital member of any group—she wasn’t the fun one, or the good-at-planning-things one, or the model-hot one.
Maybe being bad at things in front of other people is the secret glue of friendship.
“Some people just bring out the wrong colors in each other,”
Town Daughter to Wed Her Sister’s Slaughterer,’” Grant says. A stunned silence follows this as Helen turns to look at him. Grant freezes. “Sorry,” he says immediately. “Sorry—” Then she bursts into laughter. “Oh my god,” she says, wiping tears from her eyes. “You’re going to hell.” “And you’re riding shotgun with me,” Grant says as he throws the car in reverse.
“It’s the life-and-death stakes. Everyone wants to believe they could save someone else’s life, if they saw the right signs, had the right tools. Like maybe, if I say the right words, in the right combination this time, she’ll choose life. But that’s not how it happens.”
“It felt like she took all the love I had to give and said, no, it’s not good enough.
“I wrote some poetry once. It was about you.”
It might be her favorite view of him.
Whenever Grant remembers it now, it always feels like flashbacks, like—and it sounds so dumb to him, out loud—like his memory turned into a montage.
Helen thinks of all her memories of that night as locked in a single, flooded room in the back of her mind. Before she opens the door, she always tries to remember the good things first.
Grant remembers discovering he had a terrible new power that day in the pizza shop. That he could get away with killing someone and everyone would still treat him the same as always, as if he hadn’t done it at all.
You can still get hurt with your eyes wide open.”
“Sometimes I feel like I miss you when you’re right in front of me,”
“You’re so easy to love, Helen.”
“We’re very proud of you.” Helen thinks her heart might burst from the feeling of hearing him say it
And Helen Zhang has never been built for that kind of uncomplicated happily ever after.
The kind of ending where someone else sees the best and worst of me and loves me back. We’d be happy together, we’d be sad together, we’d be everything together. And when it’s all over and we’ve reached another ending, my ashes would be scattered over the tree that grows from his body because till death do us part wouldn’t be enough, because I’d need more than one brief eternity with him.
“You don’t have to be completely healed to be everything I want. To be mine. I love every part of you, you silly, infuriating woman. I love the parts of you I haven’t even met yet.”
