After Ever Happy (After, #4)
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Read between June 4 - June 6, 2024
5%
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My heart aches for her; she doesn’t deserve such a betrayal. I guess that’s the thing about betrayal, though: it holds no prejudice and preys on those who neither see it coming nor deserve it.
10%
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Looking at her right now, I can see the lack of warmth in her cheeks, the loss of hope from her eyes, the missing happiness from her full lips. I took a beautiful girl who lives her life for others, a girl who always found the good in everything, even me, and turned her into a shell whose void eyes are staring back at me now.
20%
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people can only change themselves, no matter how hard you try. They have to want it as bad as you do or there is no hope.
20%
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It’s impossible to change people who have their mind set on who they are. You can’t support them enough to make up for their low expectations, and you can’t love them enough to make up for the hate they feel for themselves. It’s a losing battle, and finally after all this time, I am ready to surrender.
24%
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You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that
24%
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his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.
38%
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There were so many things I should have said, could have said, and sure as hell
38%
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would have said if I had known my days in heaven were numbered.
43%
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If I had known it would hurt this bad, if I had known the way it would rip me apart, then sew me back together, only
43%
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to tear me into pieces again, I would have stayed as far away from Hardin Scott as I possibly could.
52%
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“Seriously, it’s okay to be sad, but if you let sadness control your life, you’ll never have one.”
54%
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I had no clue that this obnoxious blonde was walking around waiting to turn my entire life upside down by driving me absolutely insane and making me love her more than I love breathing.
60%
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She fixed me; she glued the tiny fragments of my fucked-up soul into something impossible, something almost attractive even. She made me into something—she made me normal almost—but with each drop of glue she used on me, she lost that drop of herself, and me being the piece of shit I am, didn’t have anything to offer her.
60%
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Everything that I feared would happen has happened, and no matter how much I tried to prevent it, I see now that I made it worse. I changed her and ruined her, just the way I promised I would all those months ago.
64%
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But this is how reality works: men aren’t literary heroes, they don’t change overnight, and no one does anything right here in the real world. I’m no Darcy and she’s no Elizabeth.
74%
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“I need this, Hardin. If I can’t get myself together, I would resent you and myself. I need this.” “Fine, you can have it. I’m giving this to you, not because I want to, but because this will be the last doubt I will ever entertain from you. After I give you this time and you come back to me, that’s it. You aren’t leaving again, and you will marry me. This is what I want in return for this time you need.”
85%
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We needed this time apart. We needed to be able to stand alone before we could stand together, and I’m so thankful that we made it through the darkness, the fighting, the pain, and emerged hand in hand, stronger than ever. I love him, Lord knows that I love this man; through all the separations, through all the chaos, he has crawled into my soul and marked it as his, never to be forgotten. I couldn’t have if I tried, and I did try. I tried for months to move along, day by day, keeping myself busy in an attempt to keep my mind from him.
95%
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There’s always another day, there’s always a way to make up for the shit you’ve
95%
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done and the people you’ve hurt, and there is always someone who loves you, even when you feel like you’re completely alone and you’re just out there floating along, waiting for the next disappointment. There is always something better to come.
99%
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AFTER EVERYTHING, we made it. Whatever the hell our souls are made of, they are the same.