The Butterfly Garden (The Collector, #1)

by Dot Hutchison

You have the chance to give these families peace. You have the chance to let them finally grieve and move on with their lives. You have the chance to give these girls back to their families.”

I liked the Garden at night for the same reason I loved the original fairy tales. It was what it was, nothing more and nothing less. Unless the Gardener was visiting you, darkness in the Garden was the closest we got to truth.

How could a parent have so much control over a child, that paternal pride meant more than what was right?

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

Rather than bringing his Eve to a garden, he’d built one around her, and served as the angel with the flaming sword to keep her in.

Even when you’re gone, Maya, you will not be forgotten.” The sick thing was, he genuinely meant it to be comforting.

And I obeyed because I always obeyed, because I still wanted those three and a half years even if it meant this man telling me he loved me. I obeyed when he damn near choked me, and I obeyed when he yanked me back onto his lap, obeyed when he told me to promise I wouldn’t ever forget him.

All of them knew what was happening, not just to themselves but to each other. None of them would say a word.

“Someone is just dead!” said the little girl; for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now no more, had told her, that when a star falls, a soul ascends to God.

Sometimes it was hard to make yourself get to know other people. It would just hurt more when they died, or hurt them when you died. Sometimes it was hard to believe it was worth that pain.

You never had to wait for someone to show up in the glass. You mourned them every single day, as they mourned you, because every day we were dying.”

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.

For the first time, I understood why she’d think about jumping. For the first time, those extra years didn’t seem worth the negligible possibility of escape.

But my wings couldn’t move and I couldn’t fly, and I couldn’t even cry. All that was left to me was the terror and the agony and the sorrow.

“Right and wrong doesn’t mean there’s an easy choice.”

If you don’t look at the bad thing, the bad thing can’t see you, right?

my chest tightening with tears I didn’t know how to shed.

Tereza wept, but she was there, still a little broken, with a few of the essential pieces missing, but responsive. I hugged her tightly, and for an agonizing moment I wondered if it would have been kinder to let her stay shattered. To let her die.

Adara’s depression gave her a different perspective than the rest of us, and she’d had to carefully piece herself back together several times before.

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

The couple across the street loved each other almost to distraction,

birthdays weren’t generally celebrated in the Garden. It felt a little too much like mockery, like we were celebrating how much closer we were to death.

If you don’t ask, you can keep your head buried in the sand.”

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

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

You don’t learn to be brave. You just have to do what’s right, even if it scares you.

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