The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes, #3)

by Brittany Cavallaro

I have never found routine tedious so long as it directly contributed to keeping me alive.

I was somebody who only wanted to see the world through paintings, never a photograph.

Across the room, in a beautifully upholstered booth, my quarry was having the sort of marathon business lunch that made me glad that, for whatever kind of person I was, I was at least not a twentysomething banker.

It was like therapy, except the therapists had been given bludgeons.

I wanted to relearn what it was like to be me, in places that I loved, to remember what it was like to be enough.

I am being rational, she said, lower. Being a woman with a contrary opinion does not render me hysterical.

I felt it. Felt everything. I knew I wanted to erase myself from the top down, like a drawing, and that still I wanted someone to touch my edges and tell me that they loved me despite them.

Reading took me away from myself, so I tried to be reading all the time.

Girls could be so profligate with their love, as though by spreading it wide, they would induce the world to love them back. As though the world wasn’t going to take that love and beat them with it.

I put on the skirt suit I’d pressed and prepared for the occasion. In short, I looked the part. There was pleasure in that.

“I think I’ve been impossibly awful to you. I won’t be again.”

Holmes wasn’t a myth, or a king. She was a person. And to have a relationship with a person, you had to treat them like one.