Daughter of No Worlds (The War of Lost Hearts, #1)

by Carissa Broadbent

“The way I look at it,” he said, very solemnly, so quietly that his words slipped into the air like steam, “you didn’t forget what you were. I think you remembered. And I hope no one ever again has the fucking audacity to tell you otherwise.”

“So maybe,” he whispered, “I could be made for this.” Maybe I could, too. Made, or unmade. In that moment, I didn’t care which.

While I was off in the mountains, doing . . . ​well, that . . . ​somewhere, miles away, this man was just sitting in his garden, painting his plain wife with the reverence fitting a fucking goddess.

“I had forgotten that people could be that way. I had forgotten that someone, somewhere, was painting terrible pictures of their wife in a garden. I was so far gone that I didn’t even remember that that kind of mundane contentment actually existed, least of all in the same moments as such terrible things.”

“I didn’t exactly have a wife I could ask to flop around on benches for me, and I can’t paint for shit. But after I cried myself to depletion and sobered up, I thought to myself . . .” His shoulders rose in a tiny shrug as his gaze slipped back to me. “I thought, ‘Well. I can make a garden.’ ”