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When a child goes missing, you work your ass off but don’t expect to find the poor thing alive at the end of it. Maybe you hope. You don’t expect.
He’s seen bodies so small it’s a wonder there are even coffins to fit them, seen children raped before they know the meaning of the word,
“Have you cried at all?” “Would there be a point to doing so?”
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.
Some wanted the freedom to be anyone they wanted, some of us wanted the freedom to be left alone.
I think the only reason she was going to college was because she had scholarships and getting an English degree gave her an excuse to read a lot.
Trigger warning lol. Though i want to think eng majors would just laugh this off. But who am i to know lool
“Sometimes it was easier to forget, you know?”
“You were in there, no chance of escape, no way of going back to the life you knew, so why cling to it? Why cause yourself more pain by remembering what you don’t get to have anymore?”
New York has so much history, but everyone in it just wants to know about the future.
If you’ve seen enough, you just look older, no matter what the rest of your face looks like.
“I wasn’t worried about being found; to be found, someone has to be looking for you.”
Beauty loses its meaning when you’re surrounded by too much of it.
“You really think broken children care about justice?” “Wouldn’t you?” “Never really did, no. Justice is a faulty thing at the best of times, and it doesn’t actually fix anything.” “Would you say that if you’d gotten justice as a child?” That not-quite-smile, bitter and gone too fast. “And what would I have needed justice for?”
Like beauty, desperation and fear were as common as breathing.
what if fighting makes it more painful?
“Please don’t forget me. Don’t let him be the only one to remember me.”
“It’s what I did whenever the Gardener came to my room,” she says baldly. “I wasn’t going to fight him, because I didn’t want to die, but I wasn’t going to participate either. So I let him do his thing, and to keep my mind occupied, I recited Poe’s poems.”
I was on one of the couches with a book. One of the first things I did once I had a real address was to get a library card,
Reading had been an escape when I was younger, and even though I didn’t have anything I particularly needed to escape from anymore, it was still something I loved.
The setting changed, but life didn’t.
I left everyone else alone so they left me alone too.
The girls in the glass were all preserved at the peak of their beauty, the wings on their backs brilliant and bright against young, flawless skin.
agents in crimes against children are often the first to break and burn out.
It nearly happened to him after a particularly bad case, after one too many funerals with too-small caskets for the children they’d been unable to save.
As a group, all our behaviors were learned from other Butterflies, who had learned it from other Butterflies, because the Gardener had been taking girls for over thirty fucking years.
He didn’t kidnap under the age of sixteen, erring on the side of older if he wasn’t sure, so the maximum lifespan of a Butterfly was five years.
“Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”
I liked reminding myself that there was a world beyond my cage, even if I’d never see it again.
“Do we have a perfect job? No. Do we do a perfect job? No. It isn’t possible. But we do our job, and at the end of the day, we do a hell of a lot more good than harm.
“You seem to have this strange image of me as a lost child, like I’ve just been thrown on the side of the road like garbage, or roadkill, but kids like me? We’re not lost. We may be the only ones who never are. We always know exactly where we are and where we can go. And where we can’t.”
“If you expect to be overlooked or forgotten, you’re always at least a little surprised when someone remembers you.
“And I suppose your favorite was Poe?” “Oh, no, Poe had a purpose: to distract. I liked the fairy tales. Not the watered-down Disney shit, or the sanitized Perrault versions. I liked the real ones, where horrible things happened to everyone and you really understood it wasn’t intended for children.”
“Here’s the thing, and it’s terrifying and bewildering and fuck-all unfair, but it’s still the thing: we are here as the unwilling guests of a man who will come to you for company and, as often as not, sex. Sometimes his son will come to you. You belong to them now, and they will do what they want to you, including mark you as theirs. There are quite a few of us here, and we support each other as we can, but the only way you’re getting out of here is to die, so you’re going to have to decide if this life of ours is better or worse than death.”
If I’d known then . . . but it didn’t matter. It never did. Knowing it didn’t change anything.
He left it unsaid, and in the silence there was truth.
“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?” “Well, no, but it keeps him from doing it again.” “So would his death, and without the sensationalism and tax money.”
Sometimes the illusion of freedom, of choice, was more painful than captivity.
“Then why can’t I make the best of it, like you do?” “You had a happy home, right?” “Right.” “That’s why you can’t make the best of it.”
The trouble with sociopaths, really, is that you never know where they draw their boundaries.
I’d had too many opportunities to give up, give in, and I’d kept going. If I hadn’t fallen to suicide, I wasn’t going to go meekly to my death.
He called us Butterflies, but really we were well-trained dogs.
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.
I thought how fucking unfair it was that he made us butterflies, of all things. Real butterflies could fly away, out of reach. The Gardener’s Butterflies could only ever fall, and that but rarely.
“I uphold the law. It isn’t perfect but it’s the law, and it’s what we have. Without justice, we have no order and no hope.”
“I like your idea of justice,” she says finally. “I’m just not sure it really exists.”
“Direct doesn’t mean honest. It could just mean that I’m very direct and straightforward with my lies.”
“You’re not one of us,” I said flatly. “Because of who you are, what you are, you never will be.” “Because I’m privileged?” “More than you can ever fathom.
He wanted to believe his father. I’ve never had anyone I wanted to believe that badly. I never felt that kind of need for someone to be proud of me.”
“But how does it help? To know they’ve been dead for years; to know they were raped and murdered and then violated further in death?”
