The Last Train to Key West (The Perez Family, #3)

by Chanel Cleeton

Life happens whether you’re worrying about it or not, and it seems presumptuous to think we have much of a say in how things play out.

People are a mystery, and the second you think you have them figured out, they surprise you.

It’s strange how quickly everything can change. How your life can be on one path, and suddenly, you’re on a completely different one with little to no warning at all, ill-prepared for the challenges ahead.

“Before I met Max there were men. Some good, others not so much. The bad ones will make you believe you’re nothing. They’ll make you small because that’s the only way they’ll ever see themselves as amounting to anything. It’s a lie. The second you stop believing the lie is the second you take their power away from them.”

The world has expectations of you, of how you are to shoulder your burdens with grace, of the role you play, and as soon as you don’t live up to those expectations, it’s easier for others to cast you aside rather than change how they view the world. We are defined by what we do for others, by our relationships, by what we have to offer. A married woman has a measure of security a single one does not; a pretty girl a better chance than a plain one. A soldier who comes back from war triumphant is a hero, whereas one who is broken by the effort is forgotten.

For as long as I remember, I was told not to want more than I could have, to be pleasing, and pliant, and subordinate my wants to the needs of my family, taught that the greatest height I could hope to achieve was to belong to another. No longer. Let him belong to me. Let him work to earn my affections. I’m done settling for anything less.

Sometimes I can’t understand the way this world works, why good people like Alice are taken while others are saved in spite of their wicked ways.

The thing that surprised me most about the lazy afternoons lounging naked on the couch with Billy while his parents were off somewhere else, those stolen afternoons, was how it was possible to learn a part of someone—to know a sliver of them—the expanse of freckles on their back, the sound of their sighs, the shudder of their body against yours—but for so much else to be a mystery. I thought the physical intimacy we shared all those years ago was like a key that would help me gain admittance to a locked room where all the interesting stuff was held, when in reality, it was a different room altogether—uninteresting and drab with a lumpy couch and a poor view of the road. I