The Butterfly Garden (The Collector, #1)

by Dot Hutchison

With a hand on my shoulder, he pointed down, which could have meant either sit or stay. I was the wrong kind of bitch for sit, so I chose stay, and he didn’t argue with me.

At night, the creature that was the Garden peeled back its synthetic skin to show the skeleton beneath.

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.

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

But if I’d asked, she would have asked why, and that little girl didn’t need the sympathy so much as she needed to just finally be forgotten.

There are some qualities—some incorporate things, that have a double life . . . There is a two-fold Silence—sea and shore—body and soul. One dwells in lonely places.