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To all those who try their best. That is all you can ever do.
It was in August that Dawn realised it wasn’t Hazel’s haircut or the things she talked about that she liked. It was the way she changed the air as she moved through it.
‘I don’t want to sleep with anyone else; I just want to know that someone else might want to sleep with me.’
You will be so many people in your lifetime that you’ll look back one day and not even recognise some of the people you have been.
His help, his daily presence in her life, was something physical and essential. She depended upon her father’s ability to fix what was broken.
They work and she sees, not what it will be like to be without him, but what it will be like to wait.
Because in some ways she is embarrassed by her thoughts on the matter, by the things she would say if she said anything at all. She cannot say, You cannot die, not now, because I will sometimes want to call you, to tell you a joke I read in the paper, or that I saw a famous person on the platform at London Bridge. You cannot die because you will be missing from the photographs of all the days that haven’t happened yet, the children grown up, graduations, weddings, their babies. Maggie knows you cannot tell someone they are not permitted to die, no matter how reasonable the request.
Conor keeps a secret note on his phone called Topics to talk to the children about. He notes the names of their friends, the TV shows and computer games they adore and which he has never heard of. He writes it all down and then he talks. He asks. He listens.
terrified,’ she says to Dawn, ‘that’s what it is. Think about how it looks to them. Mothers, housewives, shacking up together. We’d bring the whole system down.’
oddness of being in love with people who become less and less known to you each year.
Maggie hears footsteps on the stairs, steady, then pausing at the bedroom door and she remembers what to do. She remembers how to close her eyes, how to tuck her chin into her chest. Dawn opens the door, no more than an inch, just enough to see, enough to hear the sound of her daughter breathing in. Breathing
