The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (Flavia de Luce, #6)

by Alan Bradley

I knew that I had been trying to hang on to the past, attempting to awaken every morning to my old world: a world in which Harriet was still comfortably missing, a world in which, at least, I knew where I stood.

It’s things like this that really shake me: sudden terrifying glimpses into the world of being an adult, and they are sometimes things that I am not sure I really want to know.

Although it seems shocking to say so, grief is a funny thing. On the one hand, you’re numb, yet on the other, something inside is trying desperately to claw its way back to normal: to pull a funny face, to leap out like a jack-in-the-box, to say “Smile, damn you, smile!”

I had done the right thing and I would jolly well have to live with it.

How sad it was that we should never get to know each other.

It seemed an eternity since I had last been alone with myself.

“What are we going to do, Dogger?” It seemed a reasonable question. After all he had been through, surely Dogger knew something of hopeless situations. “We shall wait upon tomorrow,” he said. “But—what if tomorrow is worse than today?” “Then we shall wait upon the day after tomorrow.”