Cibola Burn (Expanse, #4)

by James S.A. Corey

It was more romantic—hell, more masculine—to pretend he was an island, unaffected by the waves of emotion around him. But it wasn’t true, and he’d made his peace with that fact.

He could remember a time when they’d laughed together. When Lucia had come from the hospitals on Ganymede full of stories about the patients and the other doctors. They’d eat vat-grown steak as tender as anything harvested from an animal and drink beer fermented there on the little moon. They’d talked for hours, until it was long past time to sleep. Now their conversations were so careful, it was like the words all had glass bones. So he changed the topic.

Everything was an artifact of its function. That was what made evolution so gorgeous.

One thing he’d said was Once is never. Twice is always.

Nothing proved fear like the effort of rejecting it.

“A person can fail the people they love just by being who they are. I’m who I am, and it wasn’t what my wife wanted me to be, and somethin’ had to break. You decided to do what you did down on that planet, and it put you up here with me instead of with your family.”