The Long Way Home (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #10)

by Louise Penny

For most of his adult life, Jean-Guy Beauvoir had dated bodies. He’d married Enid for her breasts, her legs, her delicate face. Her ability to make his friends weak at the knees. But when his own body had been battered and bruised and the life almost taken from it, only then did Jean-Guy discover how very attractive a heart and mind could be. A coy smile could capture him, but it was finally a hearty laugh that had freed him.

He now knew that happiness and kindness went together. There was not one without the other.

“You too?” she asked Ruth. “How do your poems start out?” “They start as a lump in the throat,” she said.

“Any real act of creation is first an act of destruction. Picasso said it, and it’s true. We don’t build on the old, we tear it down. And start fresh.” “You tear down all that’s familiar, comfortable,” said Gamache. “It must be scary.” When the old poet was quiet he asked, “Is that the lump in the throat?”

Beauvoir, while no fan of sleeping in cars, wasn’t really worried. This was the great benefit of seeing worse. Fewer things worried him now.