More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
When you’re married to a cop, there are hundreds of you in the relationship—you, him, and all his cases, their families
You know girls, Doug offered. They get crazy ideas and run off all the time. Chelsey’s lips twitched, hating the implication that being born female made you automatically guilty of something.
I’m ashamed to admit that a small, secret part of me was smug. I thought I was invincible. But then, I learned. I learned that I didn’t need shackles or chains to keep me bound. All I needed was four walls of pristine forest. And fear. The kind that festers and blisters, makes your limbs twitch. Yes. The best prisons are the ones created in our own minds.
I have a hard time not blaming myself for what happened next. I wish I didn’t. I wish this was not a cautionary tale about what happens to girls who wander off in the dark. Who are made to learn there are bad people everywhere. That the truth is these people are not strangers. They are the men who you sleep with, the men you work with, the men you raise. I wish this wasn’t what it means to be female—it is not a matter of if something bad will happen, but when.
Get it together. If you’re going to be an officer, you’ll have to be better than a woman.
More than anything, Chelsey wishes there was a way to know when you were experiencing the happiest moments of your life.
Never let an abductor take you to a second location.
He should have taught his daughters that you cannot save yourself from heartbreak. You cannot save yourself from grief.
Blaming yourself is common in these scenarios. People are conditioned to believe girls plus bad choices equals bad things. It’s a type of inoculation. Lead a good life, and nothing heinous will befall you. But no one is invulnerable. No one untouched.
Yes, Ellie thinks. I will live again. I will be a bird and I will sing.
When will it be enough? How society accepts women dying at the hands of men.
This is a thing she will carry. This is a thing she will keep. This single word. Freedom. This is how it ends.
