More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We pulled eight men from the water that night. Two of them were drunk. Two of them died, one right at my feet.
“Mr. Ismay. He knew about the ice. Marian and I ran into him yesterday on the promenade. We’d gone out to look at the sunset, and he walked up. He’d gotten a Marconigram about it from another ship. He showed it to us. He told us we were among the icebergs.”
Inside her, she felt Jack’s baby shift.
The nature of hope is curious to me. It can sustain us through the darkest of times. It can buoy us above every reasonable expectation of despair. Yet hope can shatter us just as readily as the darkness can. People refer to it as false hope, but I think that’s misleading, because the feeling itself is painfully true. It is a treacherous hope, more precisely. A dangerous one.
For your sake, Jakey, I could not allow myself to be destroyed by it.
“I have been protected by you my entire life,” she said quietly. “You, and then Jack. I’ve been the most fortunate girl in the world my entire life.”
I became, overnight, the sweetheart of the world.
“This is your fault. This is all your fault! You lured him to you. You seduced him. He would have never been on that ship if not for you.”
John Jacob Astor IV, America’s richest man and newly minted hero, was to be given what amounted to two funeral services. His widow would have preferred only one, but the little church in Rhinebeck-on-the-Hudson, where Jack had been a warden, could not fit all the mourners who wanted to pay their respects, and in any case, the Astor family mausoleum was back in Manhattan.
“Asalamu alaykum,” Madeleine whispered. “Goodbye, my heart, my guide. Goodbye, beloved.”
She was merely herself, smaller than these rooms, larger in girth than the girl she used to be, a woman with a fresh bleeding wound to her soul that could never be healed . . . but that could at least be understood by the ladies coming to visit her today.
“It was only my duty, and my honor. Knowing you’re safe at home again is thanks enough for me.”
I would not attempt to guess at the nature of true love, except to say that when I was immersed in it—swimming through it, breathing it in, holding that breath, exhaling—in those short, extraordinary days and nights I shared with your father, true love was absolutely clear to me.
