The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood.

The key to staying lost was to never love anything.

The world worked differently than he’d ever imagined. People you loved could leave and there was nothing you could do about it. Once he’d grasped that, the inevitability of leaving, he became a little older in his own eyes.

He’d always wondered what the inside of the doll might look like. For some reason, he’d thought the cotton would be brown.

maybe this was who Jude would have been if her mother hadn’t married a dark man. In this other life, the twins passed over together. Her mother married a white man and now she slipped out of mink coats at fancy parties, not waited tables in a country diner.

Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.