The Butterfly Garden (The Collector, #1)

by Dot Hutchison

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

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.”

Sometimes you can look at a wedding and realize with a certain sense of resignation that any children produced in that marriage will inevitably be fucked up and fucked over. It’s a fact, not a sense of foreboding so much as a grim acceptance that these two people should not—but definitely will—reproduce.

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

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

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