The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes, #3)

by Brittany Cavallaro

You are the one fixed point in a changing age. SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “HIS LAST BOW”

Fiction layered over reality.

I kept thinking of a film I’d seen late at night, years ago, where a boy and girl wandered a city all night long, talking and falling a little bit in love. They’d been in Europe. They’d agreed to meet again the next year if they still felt the same about each other.

Before Sunrise reference

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.

“Just because you know something about yourself doesn’t mean you should be forgiven for it.”

When things were going wrong, it was so easy to imagine that everyone knew, that everyone was talking about it. But nobody cared nearly as much about your life as you did.

“He’s my favorite person.” He was talking almost as if to himself. “Don’t you wish sometimes that who you—you spent your life with was determined just by that? Wouldn’t that make it less complicated?”

There was a kind of relief in it, the giving up.

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.

I miss you too. I miss you like breathing. Have I already said that? I do, though. I miss you like naan pizza and builder’s tea. Like you’re the home I never knew I had.