The Gifts That Bind Us (All Our Hidden Gifts, #2)

by Caroline O'Donoghue

Roe likes to use gender-neutral phrases where he can, but he and I haven’t found a word that fully replaces boyfriend yet. We’ve Googled it. Lover is icky and technically incorrect. Partner is too dull, too grown-up. After that you start falling into terms like my sweetheart, and the idea of saying that in front of people is nauseating to both of us. Sometimes I say joyfriend, as a joke, but mostly I just say Roe.

if you want to change how someone thinks, you have to know how they think and why they think it.”

You don’t have to love your home. You don’t have to think it’s perfect. But you should at least want to protect it, right?

What happens if everyone leaves? What happens when everyone goes to a big city? Do big cities just become the only real places in the world?

That is what makes spells so powerful, not the words themselves but the focus and consciousness you put on them. You understand?”

Roe is meeting new people all the time, and when you meet a new person, you have to try to forget who you are, don’t you?”

for the first time I get why my mother said that it was important to understand the people we hate. To understand that everyone was someone’s child once, and that something dreadful must have happened to make them so sick.

I know that spells cast in cruelty only pay in kind, and that every piece of magic you call on has to be done for the right reasons.

“Magic loves sex,” she says. “What? Why?” “Because it’s natural. Because it’s the opposite of control. Because it drives men crazy. Because it gives women an income. Because everything that hates magic also hates sex.”

It’s funny, the things you think about when a woman’s fingers are in your mouth.

He understands on a technical level what I only occasionally grasp with instinct.

It strikes me that a witch, a minor god, and a former zealot all living together for two weeks is a reality show I would pay to watch.

That this is one of those memories that you know is a memory as you are making it, and that it will always be known to me as some kind of end, some kind of beginning.

“Maiden, mother, crone.” She makes a chord again. Bangs it loudly. “You, Harriet, me.”

I know she’s in the building like you know a toothache is coming from the dull throb in your gums.

“We make things for a lot of people,” she says. “We even make people.”

“You,” I reply. “They made you for me.”

they wanted me to offer you what no one else could.” “And what’s that?” She smiles at me. “Options.” “Options?”

it’s a very small part of the company.” The company?

No one can figure out what happened. No one in my family can look me in the face.

“The building has been left to you, Maeve,” he says simply. “Excuse me?” “The building has been left to you,” he repeats. “It’s yours. Or, it will be yours, once you turn eighteen. Until then it will be held in trust with your parents, but it specifically stipulates here that until then, you should be granted as much dominion over the building as possible.”

You’ll have to come back here, in the end. That’s your service.