More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She wouldn’t, I think. She’s not Mom. But when I finally gather my courage and look, I could be forgiven for thinking she is. *
Salem Durant smiles again. A cat that got the cream. A story that just became twice as interesting.
Instincts without experience, one of my professors once said to me, were a liability.
Then Tegan speaks. “I found Mom’s postcards.” I watch Jess turn white. “And I know you know where she is.” Jess swallows. She tightens her fingers around her phone. And then she says, “You’d better come in.”
This job is about the truth, Hawk, she said to me a few months ago, when I’d first told her about my idea, the one that got me pursuing this career in the first place. I’m not saying it’s not about other things, too. But the truth has to be first, even when it’s about your best friend. You need to figure out if you’ll be able to tell it.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a face like hers—it’s like looking through a window at a storm. There’s rain, lightning, wind; there’re trees bending and shaking with the force of it. Part of you is glad to be separate from it. But part of you wants to press against the glass and get as close as you can.
I’ll tell you, then. They sure can break your heart. They sure can.
Protecting Tegan, taking care of Tegan. Never disappearing on Tegan the way Mom disappeared on me. * * *
“Masculinity, and how people define it. Mental health. Corporate greed. Appetites for violence. Nationalism, and not the good kind. If there is such a thing.” She smiles, approving.
“It’s about the stories he tells those women. It’s about how he creates a certain self to suit them, how he makes promises to them about all the things they’ve been taught they need from a man. Protection, affection, respect. He tells them the same story society’s been telling them, in one way or another, forever. And then when he leaves them, he takes away so much more than their money. That’s what the Baltimore story is. And it’s important.”
It’s that helping with their bags is going to make me look like I’m security.
And I’m grown enough to admit: that makes me feel insecure.
She’s about to win this standoff, and I know it’s going to hurt the woman sitting beside me. Doesn’t matter if I have an arm out for her or not.
He would say that you simply can’t cheat an honest man. Durant: Well. Well, I suppose I have to wonder about that. Since not everyone, of course, is a man.
yesterday’s brief flare of anger in front of her was regrettable but not necessarily repeatable.
And from that gentle moment afterward when he’d tried to help me anyway.
Obviously, it makes no sense. The same way it doesn’t make sense that I can still feel the strength of his arm across my chest, or that I can still see his green eyes watching mine as he asked if I was okay.
how are they so obsessed with each other already
It’s funny how he reminds me of me.
don’t want to get her to talk. At least, not for this. Not for anyone else but me, if I’m honest with myself.
Crying is for the shower, which is basically the unlocked pool gate of locations for having emotions. You can maintain a lot of plausible deniability about the moisture on your face in there.
Even the little pieces you find sometimes end up being worth something It’s one of the angles you tried Just say if you want to take a break All of it, somehow, seems to help.
Briefly, I wonder if anyone’s ever stood up in the middle of a restaurant to ask if there’s a therapist in the room.
“I don’t know what he would’ve wanted me to do. That’s a hard thing about losing him. It wouldn’t be fair of me, to guess about what he would’ve wanted, especially about this. He’s not here for me to ask.”
When she raises her eyes to mine and slowly smiles back, it suddenly becomes the best date of my life, even though it is not a date at all. Her smile is the same as her condolences. Rare. Honest. Meant.
Except if I did that, I’d miss my chance to look at you, or hear your voice, no matter how little you used it. I’d miss my chance to be near this . . . this storm I saw inside you.”
I don’t want to know you for the story. I want to know you for myself.”
Jess going to . . . do a flip, and then tell me she’s leaving?
And I feel a flutter in my middle when I think of what it would be like to have Adam Hawkins know me for no one else but himself.
Adam and I both make the exact same Midwestern exclamation of surprise, quiet opes as we steady ourselves, and it’s impossible not to meet each other’s eyes and smile, some of the tension scattering in the warm night wind.
“That was so athletic,” I say, then kiss him again, through his quiet chuckle. “I came out of retirement for you.”
I realize, with a startling sort of clarity, that I’d cut out my own heart before I treated hers carelessly.
morning. No one in the Hawkins house wields a feeling like a weapon, or like a leash.
I am twenty-one years old and I am made of doubt.
think what Mom doesn’t get is that the person you’ve loved the most—the person you’ve been willing to do anything for . . . that’s me, Jess. I’m the one you gave your heart to.”
When you were with Adam, you couldn’t disappear. He wouldn’t let you.”
always going to have your heart, Jessie. Because you gave it to me so completely, and yours taught me how to make my own. But I think—I think I need to give yours back to you now. I think you need it, because I think it’s high time you get to share it with someone else.”
