Into the Water

by Paula Hawkins

“Please,” she starts to beg, because she’s not sure that she can face it again, the blackness and the cold. She wants to go back to a home that no longer exists, to a time when she and her aunt sat in front of the fire and told stories to each other. She wants to be in her bed in their cottage, she wants to be little again, to breathe in woodsmoke and rose and the sweet warmth of her aunt’s skin. “Please.”

She sinks. By the time they drag her out the second time, her lips are the blue of a bruise, and her breath is gone for good.

when you

start taking pictures and talking to newspapers and asking questions about witches and women and lost souls, you’re not asking questions, you’re asking for trouble.

It seemed bizarre to me that her reaction to her friend’s death would be so extreme, so visceral, when her reaction to her mother’s was so restrained.

He’d been eighteen when the war started and nineteen when he went, and he came back older every time, not by months, but by years, decades, centuries.

I loved her. None of you seem to get what that means. It’s like you don’t know what love is at all. I would have done anything for her.”