Broken Harbour

by Tana French

If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you’re already halfway down.

the first thing we ever did, when we started turning into humans, was draw a line across the cave door and say: Wild stays out. What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves for the hearth fire.

Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.

“What you said at the scene the other day: how you don’t get killed unless you go looking for it. Bad things mostly happen to bad people. That’s a luxury, thinking that.