We Are All Guilty Here (North Falls, #1)

by Karin Slaughter

She also knew that everything that irritated her about her son—his stubbornness, his dogged loyalty, his blind sense of duty—were things that irritated her about herself.

“When the police finally found him—I don’t know. It’s almost indescribable. The weight came off. We were still devastated, but we could breathe again. My father backed off his drinking. My mother got out of bed. She showered. She started to arrange the funeral, pick out what to dress him in. I heard my aunt ask her how she was managing to carry on, and Mom said, ‘I just needed a place to bury my grief.’”

“Tough as hell,” he said. “When Emmy was little, we had to put a nightlight in her room, but not because she was afraid of the dark. The dark was afraid of her.”

“Good advice in general, but the thing about controlling parents is that they are teaching their children how to be controlled,” Jude said.

He had long told her that she needed to learn how to set her burdens down. The truth was, Emmy was afraid if she set them down, she would never be able to pick them back up again.

“You can’t put a person in one box, Emmy Lou, especially when they get older. You’ve gotta judge them by the totality of their lives. You do bad shit when you’re young that you regret. You do good shit when you’re old that you hope makes up for it. In the end, Gerald was a good man who did some bad things. He learned from his mistakes. He didn’t make the same ones with you.”