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“You are as strong as you need to be. And I am prouder of you than you’ll ever know.”
“But that’s not the point of studying abroad,” Ethan argued. “You don’t go to Venice because it’s changing; you go because you would change, living there. When you came home you would see everything in a new light. You would notice things—and people—that you hadn’t paid attention to before.”
She remembered something the Russian ambassador had once told her—that being drunk on vodka was the only true drunk. That while beer and wine muffled and muted your emotions, vodka revealed them.
Falling in love with Connor had been a breathless, heart-stopping whirlwind. While this—whatever it was between her and Teddy—didn’t stop her heart or crush the air from her lungs. He made her pulse race faster, made it easier to breathe. As if she’d been trapped in a sealed room and now someone had finally thrown open a window.
Real love comes from facing life together, with all its messes and surprises and joys.
That was Washington, Nina thought, a city of contradictions: crowded and cruel and thrilling and lovely all at once.
“Are we still friends?” Himari scoffed, as if it were self-evident. “What else could we be? Only friends know each other well enough to cause this kind of hurt. Only friends push each other past the breaking point.”
She felt that she had gained and lost the world in a single morning.
A destiny was something that happened to you, that fell upon you like rain no matter how desperately you tried to hide from it. But if you walked toward it with your head held high, then it wasn’t your fate—it was simply your future.
Beatrice had come to understand that the human heart was a magical thing. It had so much room inside it, enough room to contain more than one love over the course of a lifetime.
Except Beatrice was no longer a girl who needed protecting. Connor wanted to charge in like a knight in shining armor, offering to rescue her. Whereas Teddy gave her the confidence to rescue herself.
“No matter what you do, no matter how high you climb, you’ll never have anyone to share it with,” Nina said coldly. “You’ll be completely alone.”
They stood like that for a while, clinging to each other with such force that Sam couldn’t have said which of them was leaning on the other. Maybe they both were. That was what you did with family, wasn’t it? You grabbed hold of them and didn’t let go. You supported each other’s weight, held each other up, even when you lacked the strength to stand on your own.
The important thing is that you do exactly what a princess is meant to do.” “Which is?” “Help people believe in themselves.”
“If I marry you now, I’m validating the claims of all those people who say a woman can’t rule alone. I want to prove them wrong.”
