The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut Universe, #1)

by Mary Robinette Kowal

Without a plane, what was I supposed to do? Math the problem to death?

But if I didn’t know, then I could still hope. And hope would kill me.

That’s what we did. We survived. And we remembered.

Sometimes the best course was to pretend it wasn’t happening.

My husband was a good man. He believed in me. And he also had a huge blind spot, because he didn’t see how people would ignore what I said until he repeated it.

“Yes. Marriage, too, is a threshold between Before and After. We have many of these, every day, which we do not recognize. The threshold is not the question. There will always be Befores and Afters. The question is: what do you do after you cross that threshold?”

If a woman tells him, he’ll have to either pretend he understands it, or admit that he’s not smart enough to be making a decision on this.”

To respond or not to respond, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to suffer the bait of defensive posturing or to

What I’d come to realize is that, with kids like these, it was less about me and more about elevating them—not because it was me, but because I was something out of the ordinary.

I was so very glad to have her back, but she brought ghosts with her.