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“Do you talk to the person sitting beside you on the train?” “Yes,” he said promptly. “Oh, that’s awful,” Jane said before she could stop herself, and he burst out laughing.
Books are my happy place, he’d told her, and she’d felt herself light up, because that’s exactly what they are to her, too.
“I’ve just validated all your stuff about how people always let you down, haven’t I? You’re not mad because you’re not even surprised.”
Every day is a good day, if you look hard enough.
Sometimes we can’t tell a truth until we’re ready.”
It sounds so pathetically clichéd, can’t stay away—the sort of thing weak people say to justify bad behavior. And it hardly comes close to expressing the compulsion, the craving Siobhan has for him, how just the thought of him makes her warm, as if she’s sliding into a perfectly hot bath.
“Siobhan,” Fiona says, sprinkling lavender oil into the bath. “How many times have you looked after me?” Yes, Siobhan thinks, but that’s different. That’s their dynamic—Siobhan’s the fixer, the one who sweeps in and sorts things out for everybody else. She never lets anybody see her weak like this, not even Fiona.
Perhaps I am not so hard to like, Jane thinks fiercely as she meets Aggie’s eyes. Perhaps I am not so peculiar, so awkward, so difficult. Perhaps he was wrong about all that, too.
It’s one of those feelings, happiness. One of the ones you don’t really notice is gone until it comes back.
“That’s the difference between a friend and a lover, Jane. A friend doesn’t need the whole of you. If you don’t want to tell me about your life before we met, I don’t give a toss—I’m in it for the Jane that’s here and now, aren’t I? I take you as you come. But if I loved you, I’d want everything. Wouldn’t I? Don’t you want all of him? All his secrets? All the versions of Joseph that exist out there, all the people he is when he’s at work and with his mother and with the lads at the pub?”
Being a human is messy, Jane, Aggie told her the other day. No amount of rules can fix that. Sometimes you just need to let yourself feel something, even if it’s ugly.
She’s crying hard but silently, the well-practiced sobs of someone who knows how to stay unheard.
Most people are shit, what are you going to do about it? And she thinks, I’m going to notice all the ones who are doing their very best not to be.
