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People wondered what it was about California that produced so many serial killers.
Maybe in gloomier states people were too cold and depressed to act upon their violent obsessions and fantasies.
It was hard to mother a child who didn’t like you.
It was harder for beautiful people like him to get old because they had so much further to fall and so many adjustments to make, going from a world where things came easy because you were so damn dazzling, to a world where you had to fight to prove you were even average.
Desert topography could be deceptive. Kind of like life. You kept thinking you’d made it, but in reality the place you wanted was always out of reach.
On one of their magical mornings together, her grandmother told her that men were behind all the problems in the world, and that women had to take care of each other.
When his name changed, he’d shed that outward identity even though he’d remained the same person inside.
Abuse came wrapped in different packages, and indifference to a partner’s pain was one of them.
There was no starting over for most people. That was a misconception. Unless a person’s memory could be erased, there were no fresh starts, only progression.
Even if you burned down a house where bad things had happened, the house would still be there in your mind, regardless.
She believed in depression and hormonal imbalance. But the root of it, the damn root of it that absolutely nobody talked about, was that when an infant was born it took your soul. Nobody wanted to talk about that.
world, and bad things had happened to both of them, but nature brought solace. Not that the bad things could be erased and forgotten. They couldn’t. The murders. The evil. But she and Daniel were only specks in the universe. Stardust. While that might overwhelm some people, it brought her comfort. To know that once the bad people were locked up, once the victims were buried, once the bodies were found, once she’d cried it all out, this would remain. Strong, enduring.
Curiosity and the ability to be amazed were essential for them both right now. When those responses slipped away, a person was in trouble. Awe was part of the human experience that couldn’t and shouldn’t be discounted.