Things We Do in the Dark

by Jennifer Hillier

She can kill with a smile, she can wound with her eyes

While the age difference was never a problem for Jimmy—why would it be?—it makes Paris look like a gold-digging bitch who was just waiting for her husband to die. And now he’s dead.

Paris’s husband might not have been her greatest love—that honor still belongs to someone she knew years ago, in a different life, when she was a very different person—but Jimmy Peralta was the love of this life, the one she built from the ashes of her old one.

You can run all the way from Toronto, away from the dead bodies and into a whole new life with a whole new name, and it still doesn’t matter. Because while you can reinvent yourself, you can’t outrun yourself.

the common denominator in all the terrible things that have happened to you is you. Everywhere you go, there you are.

Joey never doubted that she was the worst thing that ever happened to her mother. Just like her mother was the worst thing that ever happened to her.

“I’m used to pretending to not exist.”

Some people wear their hearts on their sleeve. Joey wore her trauma around her neck.

She kissed him back, and it felt right, and good, and he couldn’t remember the last time he kissed someone he cared about so much. He loved Simone, but with Joey, it felt like his feelings were on an entirely different level. It was terrifying, and wrong, and amazing, and right.

Joey’s diaries stopped once her mother’s trial began. But in the last few entries, which Joey wrote in vivid detail, was the voice of a girl who had learned to accept that her life would always be shitty, because nobody ever told her she deserved better.