The Butterfly Garden (The Collector, #1)

by Dot Hutchison

you think I won’t recognize a broken child when she sits in front of me?” She inclines her head to concede the point, then bites her lip and winces. “Not entirely accurate. Let’s call me a shadow child, overlooked rather than broken. I’m the teddy bear gathering dust bunnies under the bed, not the one-legged soldier.”

looks away from the picture, giving him a bemused look. “‘The Valley of Unrest,’” she repeats. “It’s a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. ‘They had gone unto the wars, trusting to the mild-eyed stars, nightly, from their azure towers, to keep watch above the flowers’ . . . I like Poe. There’s something refreshing about a man who’s so unabashedly morose.”