The Lola Quartet

by Emily St. John Mandel

If you tell a lie it’s easier to tell another. An abyss yawns suddenly at your feet. At night he went home and stared into the flickering blue of the television and felt almost nothing.

mostly his work just made him dislike houses. These enormous anchors that people tied to their lives.

She was as alone in the car as she’d been in the house, but at least the car didn’t echo with anyone else’s absence.

coats. It sounds trivial but it isn’t, because the profession exploded in the 1920s. These were men who’d been through trench warfare and emerged hard and half-broken into the glitter and commotion of the between-wars world; men out of time, out of place, hanging on by the threads of their uneven souls. The detectives were honourable but they’d seen too much to be good. The hardest among them had seen too much to be frightened. The mean streets were nothing compared to the trenches of Europe. Some of them had lost everything and all of them had lost something, and consequently most of them drank too much.

“I came to apologize,” Deval said. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” He was looking at Gavin’s arm in the sling. Gavin nodded but said nothing. He wasn’t sure what a person was supposed to say in these circumstances, what the etiquette was for forgiving or failing to forgive the man who’d sent a bullet into your arm. His bandages itched.

Delirious Things

Sasha found herself at a loss for words. What am I asking you? I’m asking you if I was complicit in something unspeakable, because Anna, Anna, I already carry so much. The tears hot on her face.

addict. I’d say there but for the grace of God goes Chloe, but it isn’t really God who gets to decide this one, is it?”

‘You pay with money or you pay with your family.’