Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

But María has known, all her life, that she is not meant for common paths, for humble houses and modest men. If she must walk a woman’s road, then it will take her somewhere new.

“Two kinds of women have leave to wander through this world alone and unmolested. Nuns, and widows. And I am not close enough with God to be a nun.”

“A name is like a dress. It might be by nature pretty or plain, but it is the person wearing it who matters most.”

María is not a patient pupil. Her temper is quick to burn, and hard to quench.

“One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.”

The food is to her in-laws’ taste, which is to say it is both bland and overcooked, proof that money does not buy a palate.

Something new, and yet familiar, some version of her that has been buried for a long, long time, and has at last been watered, tended, given leave to bloom.

Alice’s hand responds before her brain, reaching to take the thing just because Catty held it toward her. Because that is the power of big sisters, the urge to take anything they offer.

A steady current of students fills the hall, headphones on, heads bowed, one of those grim reminders that your life is small and the world is big, and even when it feels like it’s falling down, it’s only falling down on you.

(And it breaks Alice’s heart that Dad’s happiness and her sister’s hurt go hand in hand, or worse, that they are angled at each other, like pistols, or blades, and all she can do is put herself between them.)

What is the point, she thinks, of loving something you are doomed to lose? Of holding on to someone who cannot hold on to you?

At that, Charlotte—who could keep a secret off her tongue but not her face—made the fatal mistake of flinching,

And there it is, that feeling the men have tried and failed to stir in her, that heady, ground-tipping mix of hope and fear, the hunger to move closer, and to shrink away.

“It will make your life harder,” she said into her daughter’s hair. “But it will also make it beautiful.”

“The greatest gift,” her aunt declared, “is one’s attention.”

How easy it is, to see danger once it’s passed. But she is young, and filled with dread and want, both warring in her chest. And she has come this far.

And here is the awful thing about belief. It is a current, like compulsion. Hard to forge when it goes against your will, but easy enough when it carries you the way you want to go.

“Why are you being so kind?” she asks, even as she begins to sink. Antonia’s voice follows her down. “We grow together in this garden.”

“The fact is, whether death takes you all at once, or steals pieces over time, in the end there is no such thing as immortality. Some of us just die slower than the rest.”

“But what good is a soul, really?” she muses, as if it’s the first time she’s stopped to wonder. As if it’s not the question that plagued her that first night, that still plagues her after all these years.

It’s not that she forgets. She never will. But time wears the edges off all things. Including vigilance.

“Isn’t it lonely?” “It doesn’t have to be. After all, loneliness is just like us,” says Ezra. “It has to be invited in.”

“And for all that happened after, for everything she did to me, I still remember what it felt like, to be noticed, to be wanted, to be seen. I wanted you to feel that, too.”

something about tired minds being good soil for bad thoughts. How the best thing you can do is go to bed.