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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“I would have fallen in love with you sooner, if you’d let me,”
“You’re so easy to love, Helen.”
driving away from the stupid damn love of my life”—and
Song
“This is all I can give you,” she whispers. “This is the best I can do.”
“I’ll take it, you know I’ll take it,”
“I was thinking I missed you.”
“You gotta stop saying things like that out loud,” he says gruffly. “It’s fucking killing me.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk so much, crackerjack,”
sweetheart,”
“You could keep me your dirty little secret, come to me tasting like other men, I’d still take you back every fucking time,” he says, a muscle ticking violently in his jaw. “I’d rather have a fraction of you than all of someone else.” Helen swallows. “I don’t want that for you. For either of us. It’s not—it’s not healthy.” “I don’t want to be healthy,” Grant says, and his chest is heaving as if he’s just run a marathon. “I just want you.”
“Have a nice life, crackerjack.”
I’m not fine. I haven’t been for a while, and I blamed you for so long because the last thing you ever did was teach me how much loving can hurt. I loved you and you left anyway.
Then I fell in love for the first time, for real. It made me want to fix something I’d been pretending wasn’t broken: my own barely beating heart.
Letter to her sister
If I heal and move on, I’m worried I’ll finally lose you for good. But I want to be healthy. And I want to be happy, though I’ve never trusted happiness. To me, happiness is a fleeting, heartbeat-to-heartbeat experience that comes and goes and hopefully comes back.
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.
Still—I hope this is the kind of story where there’s an epilogue. One day I’ll turn the last page, and suddenly—there you’ll be. And I’ll walk up to another chance to get everything right, this time.
I’d start by telling you, “I love you.” I’ll keep hoping for the both of us.
Yours, Helen.
“I want the nights and the days and the weekends and the holidays and I want you at my side and in my bed and in my life. I want to meet your parents and I want to take you to a sheep farm in fucking Ireland and my dad’s place in Boston. I want to see what kind of person you are when you’re eighty. I want to do this for real, and I want to call you mine so badly it’s a fucking joke, but if you can’t sign up for the whole show this time, then don’t—”
“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.”
