It Ends with Us (It Ends with Us, #1)

by Colleen Hoover

is so much more good in him than bad, and I’ll do whatever I can to convince him of that until he can see it, too.

Sometimes the girl inside of me—the daughter of my father—is really opinionated. She tells me I shouldn’t have forgiven him. She tells me I should have left the first time. And sometimes I believe that voice.

She’ll wonder all the same things I used to wonder about my own mother when I saw her in my same situation.

I am in love with a man who physically hurts me. Of all people, I have no idea how I let myself get to this point.

“But I shouldn’t have had the magnet. I should have told him about the tattoo from the beginning. I shouldn’t have kept the journals.”

I read somewhere once that 85 percent of women return to abusive situations.

But sometimes the reason women go back is simply because they’re in love.

I’m a statistic now.

Shouldn’t there be more distaste in our mouths for the abusers than for those who continue to love the abusers?

I wonder if he’s ruined me. If the fear of him will ever leave me.

It’s easy when we’re on the outside to believe that we would walk away without a second thought if a person mistreated us.

And as hard as this choice is, we break the pattern before the pattern breaks us.

Cycles exist because they are excruciating to break. It takes an astronomical amount of pain and courage to disrupt a familiar pattern. Sometimes it seems easier to just keep running in the same familiar circles, rather than facing the fear of jumping and possibly not landing on your feet.

I’ll be damned if I allow my daughter to go through it.