The Keeper of Happy Endings

by Barbara Davis

How I longed to be like her when I was a girl, to look the world straight in the eye and dare its opinion, to follow my own dreams and chase my own wishes.

Pain has a way of hardening us, each new heartbreak laying down a fresh layer of protection, like the nacre of a pearl, until we think ourselves impenetrable, immune to both our present and our past.

Love didn’t conquer all, heroes weren’t invincible, and lovers rarely rode off into the sunset together. Broken hearts stayed broken.

Until you know for sure, there is still hope. And hope costs us nothing.”

Without faith, even our work is doomed to fail. Faith is everything.

A bride must remember that in being bound to her lover, she is also bound to his family, and that we make no claims with regard to the success of those relationships. Such is not our work.

“Being strong for too long makes one brittle, chérie. And brittle things break easily.”

There are times for holding on in this life and times for letting go. You must learn to know the difference.

“I never said it was by chance. I mean, it couldn’t be, could it? Chance is one of those things we pull out when we have no other explanation for what’s happened. But there are all kinds of things we don’t understand. Forces we can’t see. That doesn’t mean they’re not at work. And there’s always been something special about Soline. Something . . . otherworldly.”

“It’s a hard thing for a mother to relinquish her bébé. You’ve been a part of her life for a very long time, her whole world, and now all of a sudden, you’re grown up with a life of your own. She’s lonely.”

“In France we say, tu me manques. It means ‘you are missing from me.’ Not I miss you—the way Americans say it—but you are missing from me. The part of you that is a part of me . . . is gone. This is how it is for her. There’s a void in her life where you used to be, and she doesn’t know how to fill it.”

There is a grief worse than death. It is the grief of a life half-lived. Not because you don’t know what could have been but because you do.

Lovers wound one another for many reasons, but in the end, fear is always at the root of it. It’s a hard thing, perhaps the hardest of all, to trust when we’re afraid—to open ourselves to the risk of forgiveness. But forgiveness is the greatest magick of all. Forgiveness makes all things new.

Forty years is a long time, but it’s an especially long time for a woman.