The Mercy of Gods (The Captive's War #1)

by James S.A. Corey

at the end of things, Dafyd would be amazed at how many of the critical choices in his life seemed small at the time. How many overwhelming problems had, with the distance of time, proved trivial. Even when he sensed the gravity of a situation, he often attributed it to the wrong things.

The other man never noticed that Dafyd wasn’t offering back any information about himself. Dafyd listened because he was good at listening. He had a lot of practice. It kept the spotlight off him, people broadly seemed more hungry to be heard than they knew, and usually by the end of it, they found themselves liking him. Which was convenient, even on those occasions when he didn’t find himself liking them back.

Looked at in a wide enough frame, maybe her problems weren’t so large. They just seemed that way when she held them up against her eyes where they’d block out all the light.