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Mercy had put in her time with Dave. Trying to help him. Trying to heal him. Trying to love him enough. Trying to be enough. Trying, trying, trying not to drown in the quicksand of his aching need.
And then Mercy had realized that what had happened to Dave when he was a child didn’t matter. What mattered was the hell he put her through now that he was an adult. His need was the bottomless hole in the quicksand.
What Dave liked about cheating wasn’t the sex. God knew his pecker was hit or miss. What he loved was the act of cheating. Skulking around. Texting secret messages into his burner phone. Swiping through dating apps. Lying about where he was going, when he would be back, who he was with. Knowing that Mercy would be humiliated.
Her skin crawled at his jovial tone. This was the Papa that everyone adored. Mercy had loved watching this version of her father when she was a kid. Then she had started wondering why he couldn’t be that same cheerful, charming man to his own family.
When I was a kid, I started drinking to drown away my demons but what I did was create a prison for myself trapped with the demons inside.
Shitty men were like periods. Once you had your first one, your life was consumed by dread or panic over when it would show up again.
Georgia would be Mississippi without metro Atlanta’s tax dollars. Everybody romanticized country living until they needed internet and healthcare.
I hate when grown women speak in that breathless girlie voice. It’s like Holly Hobby fucked the Devil.”
“I didn’t marry him to change him.” “Your level of healthy interaction can be really annoying sometimes.”
When you’re in the service industry, people are always pulling at you. All day, you’re getting nibbled to death by ducks. Mercy understood how that feels. She let her hair down with us.
Karin Slaughter is the founder of the Save the Libraries project—a nonprofit organization established to support libraries and library programming.
