The Keeper of Happy Endings

by Barbara Davis

Alas, we women seldom get the life we would choose for ourselves. Instead, our lot is chosen for us, by those who claim to know best, and before we know it, we’ve been shaped into someone we don’t recognize, remade in someone else’s image.

Every soul creates an echo. Like a fingerprint or signature that becomes infused in the things around us. Who we are. Where we belong. What we’re meant to bring to the world. No two echoes are alike.

“Led by un fou—a madman with a shadow on his soul. He will take everything. And what he cannot take, he will destroy.”

People always find a way to justify their hate—and give others an excuse to fall in line.

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. You realize too late that it was there for the taking—right there in your hands—and you let it slip away.

Our joys and sorrows. Our loves and losses. That is who we are, a tally of all our agonies and ecstasies. Sometimes the agonies leave a mark, like a bruise on the soul. We do our best to hide them from the world, and from ourselves too. Because we’re afraid of being fragile. Of being damaged.

“How a person behaves toward us is never about us, Rory. It’s about them.

“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.

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.