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To me, the allure of history lay in the minutiae of life long ago, the untold secrets of ordinary people.
And Brontë and Dickens and everything else I’d adored for so many years remained in boxes, hidden in the far corner of our basement, unopened and eventually forgotten.
Alone, I could do whatever I damn well pleased.
Twelve minutes. A fraction of a lifetime, yet enough to alter the course of it.
probably once belonging to a person of little significance, someone whose name wasn’t recorded in a textbook, but whose life was fascinating all the same.
The sun could not rise soon enough.
I made a silent plea that she would never think thoughts as dark and terrible as my own.
It is the most distressing thing, Eliza, to issue pain to someone, even when you know it is for the best.”
The world is not kind to us… There are few places for a woman to leave an indelible mark.”
“The register is important because the names of these women might otherwise be forgotten. They are preserved here, in your pages, if nowhere else.”
a woman does not need to hide behind a wall if she has no secrets and does no wrong.”
“First, there was trust. Then, there was betrayal. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot be betrayed by someone you do not trust.”
“I do not wish you a life of goodbyes, as the one I have lived.”
Did everything reinvent itself over time? It was beginning to seem like every person, every place, carried an untold story with long-buried truths resting just beneath the surface.
the demon in my skull was not yet at rest.
Had all of my life led me to this destiny, that fateful moment when the cold water would braid around me and pull me under?
But death was permanent. What earthly objects, then, did I need?
Everything placed unto the body removes something from it, calls it forth or represses it.
“It’s okay to change,” I interrupted, “but it’s not okay to hide, to bury parts of ourselves.”
All that I’d lost, or all that I hadn’t?
