Jar of Hearts

by Jennifer Hillier

If they gave degrees for compartmentalizing, Geo would have a Ph.D.

She knows how terrible it sounds, because she knows how terrible it was.

That life was over now. Everything she’d worked for, everything she’d created, the life she’d built on top of the secret she tried to keep hidden . . . it was all evaporating right before her eyes.

In the real world, you earned it through hard work, admiration, loyalty, and sometimes love. In prison, there was only one way: You earned respect through fear.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”

Remorseful or not, nobody’s a better liar than Georgina Shaw.

But it doesn’t work that way. The past is always with you, whether you choose to think about it or not, whether you take responsibility for it or not. You carry the past with you because it transforms you. You can try to bury it and pretend it never happened, but that doesn’t work. Geo knows that from experience. Because buried things can, and do, come back.

She loved Calvin so much that she began to accept that this was part of the package, part of the price she had to pay to be with him. Because the alternative—not being with him—was unfathomable.

Living a life that isn’t meant for you is its own version of hell.

In every story, there’s a hero and villain. Sometimes one person can be both.

Everyone has a single defining moment in life, something that thrusts them irrevocably into a new direction, something that affects them at their core, something that changes them forever.

This wasn’t sex at all, was it? This was something else entirely. This was dominance. This was taking something he wanted that she didn’t want to give. This was rape.