Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake, #1)

by Rachel Caine

None of us is whole anymore.

scars and all, it has survived, and it still keeps rolling. The symbolism isn’t lost on me.

Gina Royal lies dead in the past; I’m not that woman anymore.

Gina’s long dead, and I don’t mourn her.

I feel so distant that I wouldn’t recognize the old me if I passed her on the street.

I’m glad I’ve escaped a hell I had hardly even recognized when I was burning in it. Glad that I’...

Most people just take up space anyway.

Mel infected me like a virus, and I have an unhealthy surety deep down that I’ll never get completely well again.

One thing about my kids: they stick together. Always, even while they bicker and fight. They haven’t let each other down since the day of The Event.

I see him in the shape of her eyes, in the tilt of her head. And that scares me.

He’d never thought of the women he’d tortured and murdered as people. He thought of them as objects. Things.

To this particular crop of vigilantes, the victims didn’t matter alive, and they don’t matter now.

All I want to do is survive—and keep my kids as safe as I can.

“What’s good for you never feels good,

I’m fully committed to our survival.

I don’t want to have to show him that world, the reality that runs like a black river underneath this one.

in his mind, they’re just reflections of himself. Not real people in their own right.

If he meets them now, recognizes they’re not the little plastic dolls he loved before . . . they’ll become other. Potential victims, like me.

Lanny is wrong about why I put on the gloves. It isn’t to preserve evidence. I wear them for the same reason doctors do: to prevent infection. Melvin Royal is a contagious, fatal disease.

every once in a while I see a look, a tilt of his head, that reminds me so strongly of his father that I go cold inside,

I don’t believe that evil is inherited. I can’t.

Living with Mel was nothing but lies, always lies, no matter how warm and comforting they had seemed.

for all we pretend, as hard as we can ever pretend, we will never, ever be normal again.

Maybe it was the lack of attachment she’d had to me as a child, and I to her; maybe she could so easily believe the worst because she felt she’d never really known me at all.

I will never, ever do that to my children. I will defend them with complete devotion. None of this is their fault.

My own mother has always ...

I hope that my kids aren’t that good at lying, because that, too, is a Melvin Royal signature trait.

I don’t trust myself that way anymore, and I can’t bring myself to allow the lowering of barriers that comes with even the most casual of relationships.

I’ve been lulled into underestimating police before, and I suffered for it.

I don’t know what that means, but I feel the pit open under me, I feel the drop. Something very bad has just begun.

A day’s delay might be nothing to most people, but it could mean the difference between life and death to us.

I hear the damage I’ve done to them both in her flat intonation.

She’s become resigned to the terrible, inhuman idea that she can never have friends, or family, or even favorite things, and she’s learned to live with that at the tender age of fourteen, and I can’t. I can’t do it to her again.

Whatever comes, I tell myself, we aren’t running away from it.

the way the killer weighed down the body. And the age and description of the victim—it rings some kind of bell, something distant, but I can’t lay hands on a memory to go with it.

Never close off escape. That’s been my mantra for years now, and it’s pure survival instinct.

this article, the similarities to my ex-husband’s crimes . . . it’s woken something uneasy in me that I’ve learned to heed.

I no longer feel the safety I did before, in the face of that story. It doesn’t mean I’m running. But it means I need to prepare.

I’d thought this would be the place where we’d get to break that cycle. Maybe it still is, but I need to be practical.

Escape needs to be a viable option. Always.

I like being Gwen Proctor because real or not, she is a full and strong person, and I can rely on her.

“Some people, for instance, don’t want anybody to know where they’re going when they leave town. Or what they’re driving.

“Far as I know, you’re legal as hell, so I got no problem telling people I don’t know where you go when you leave here, and I don’t have to tell them about the van.

There had been one part of our lives that was strikingly not normal, but that was a personal, private hell that I’d been forced to relive under police questioning. Was it abuse? Yes, but sexual abuse between married people is a tangled topic at best.

I endured it, over and over, never knowing that while he was starving me for oxygen during sex, he was imagining his women in the garage, fighting the noose as he raised and lowered them off the ground.

It might not have been abuse, but there isn’t any doubt in my mind that it felt wrong. Looking back, the thought that he was using me to play out his murders, over and over again . . . it’s chilling, and sickening.

a gun can’t protect you unless you protect yourself mentally, emotionally, and logically. It’s the punctuation at the end, not the paragraph.

If my son, of all people, has been sneaking away, being on his own . . . that frightens me in a way I can’t even explain. His father liked to be on his own.

I would give anything to be settled, and to avoid more experiences,

“He was a good dad. He didn’t pretend about that.” My son says it with perfect calm,