What Can't Be Seen (Dr. Gretchen White, #2)

by Brianna Labuskes

“If you tell the world someone is crazy enough times, the world stops believing them when they say they aren’t,”

Psychopaths, on the other hand, landed in jail more often than not. Not all killed, but there were plenty of ways to inflict violence even if it never turned fatal. It wasn’t if a psychopath would be consumed by the flames, but when.

“Genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger,” Gretchen drawled. “You’ve heard me say that.”

sociopathic tendencies presented on a spectrum, one that included lack of remorse, delusions of grandeur, a repeated failure to accept responsibility.

The cops had asked her father for Jenny’s diary, and he’d handed it over as quickly as possible. But Tabby wasn’t looking for her sister’s account of petty grievances and crushes. That’s not what told the story of a girl’s final days. People had a way of lying in those pages, even when the audience was just themselves.

“When assessing any given situation, we’re limited to our own experience, logic, or creativity—but there’s a world of causes and effects out there that you simply can’t imagine. Not understanding that is why some people fall into conspiracy theory rabbit holes.”

Pareidolia was the technical name for it, and it was the same thing that made kids find shapes in clouds or adults see faces in inanimate objects. Evolutionarily speaking, the impulse was extraordinarily important to humans, whose survival relied on social connections. But it did make people take leaps in connecting unrelated things and could lead to dangerous conspiratorial thinking.

“Reality is a funny thing, isn’t it?” Daniels said blearily. “There’s no such thing as a true reality because we all see it through our own lens. No two people share the same version of reality. And yet we all seem to just accept that we’re all having the same experience.”

“Did you know when you move your head too quickly for your eyes to focus that your brain just guesses at what’s there so you don’t get seasick from the blurry images?” Daniels asked, clearly enjoying the slide into his drunkenness. “A good twenty percent of what we see is actually just our brain filling in the gaps.”

We need people in our lives who don’t expect us to be anything but what we are.

He wanted to be dead, but he couldn’t kill himself because he was too afraid to die. There was some kind of beautiful justice in that.