A Novel Way to Die (Nevermore Bookshop Mysteries, #6)

by Steffanie Holmes

“Don’t you understand that I cannot live without you? If he took you from me, from us, then he’d take my soul along with him.”

“It’s the greatest honor of my life to love and to be loved by you. I love you the way a writer loves a story that refuses to fall from their fingers – I love you because you’re infuriating and precious and always just out of reach. I don’t want you to save me from loving you. I want to throw myself into your fire and burn up inside it. And it’s because I love you that what you’re doing hurts—”

“Don’t you see, Mina? His heart’s not coal – it’s made of paper. An origami heart that’s torn and frayed at the edges, and he thinks to encase it with glass so it can’t be torn again. He wants to save us from having our hearts torn up, too. He doesn’t seem to realize that the cuts and the rips and the puncture wounds are love. You can never keep your heart whole and safe, but when imperfect hearts join together, they—”

Sometimes, life doesn’t give you the happily ever after. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make a tragedy into something beautiful.

Stories are what connect us, shape us, bring us into existence and snuff us from history.” Dante gestured around him at the vastness of the plains. “The reality of this, and what’s beyond all this, is too complex for the human mind to conceive. But stories give form to the universe, order to the chaos, substance to the unknown. Stories give us beginnings and middles and endings. Stories take our base instincts and weave love and heartache and redemption and pleasure and forgiveness into every word, until we believe ourselves to be essential to the plot rather than being swept along by it.