The Butterfly Garden (The Collector, #1)

by Dot Hutchison

You learn things over time, and that was one of the biggest things I learned about him. He wanted to find more joy in life than he did.

And when it was done, there I was, just another one of the Butterflies in his Garden. God creating his own little world.”

Some wanted the freedom to be anyone they wanted, some of us wanted the freedom to be left alone.

Beauty loses its meaning when you’re surrounded by too much of it. “So, this is the new girl.” She flopped down on the bed, hugging a small pillow to her chest. “What’d the bastard name you?”

I wondered if it would continue to be that way, if in time the word wouldn’t hurt at all, or if it was a tiny shard that always would, like the piece of a splinter you can’t reach with tweezers.

“We have an expiration date then?” I asked quietly. “Twenty-one?”

I didn’t leave the house after dark, and every night I fell asleep to a lullaby of gunshots and sirens.

She was one of the first Butterflies; she’s known the Garden twice as long as she’s known anything else.

Beautiful things are short-lived, he told me the first time we met.

then he strove to give his Butterflies a strange breed of immortality.

This girl has never had a superhero. He wonders if she ever even wanted one.

Not counting the overlaps, that was still more than six generations of Butterflies.

“Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”

Death was a strange thing in the Garden, an omnipresent threat but not something we actually saw.

sick.” I rarely lied to the Gardener; the truth was the one thing that could always be mine.

“My secrets are old friends; I would feel like a poor friend if I abandoned them now.”

“Does ‘justice’ change any of what he did? Any of what we went through? Does it bring the girls in glass back to life?”

I was the wrong kind of bitch for sit, so I chose stay, and he didn’t argue with me.

The trouble with sociopaths, really, is that you never know where they draw their boundaries.

The Gardener never seemed to think of himself as villainous, anyway.

this. I’d had too many opportunities to give up, give in, and I’d kept going.

Yet if hope has flown away in a night, or in a day, or in none, is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Too aware of all the ways he worked to pull responses from me, and all the ways my body betrayed me by obeying, because there was never enough fear from me or brutality from him to shut things off completely.

The Gardener’s Butterflies could only ever fall, and that but rarely.

Three butterflies for a broken girl: one for personality, one for possession, and one for pettiness.

Unless the Gardener was visiting you, darkness in the Garden was the closest we got to truth.

“Not making a choice is a choice. Neutrality is a concept, not a fact. No one actually gets to live their lives that way.” “Seemed to work for Switzerland.”

soul. I’d gotten used to the sick feeling that came with letting the Gardener fuck me, but I’d never get used to the nauseating pain that came of letting him believe he loved me.

But my wings couldn’t move and I couldn’t fly, and I couldn’t even cry.

Maybe I could change him.

Every day he helped keep us here, he hurt me.

I needed him to truly love me, to be willing to fight for me, and that wasn’t going to happen if he was still sharing me with his father and brother.

Because a name means more than a life. Than all our lives.

Cowardice may be our natural state but it’s still a choice.

That man had an astonishing talent for seeing what he wanted to see.

We were a fucked-up family, but a family nonetheless.

My heart hurt because I wanted to be proud of him, but really, all I could think was it’s about fucking time.

“I think a trauma doesn’t stop just because you’ve been rescued.”

“The carousel’s over now,” he tells her quietly. “This time your family is waiting for you.”