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Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy. Pity strips you bare. Pity shrinks.
Jenny was always prodding, trying to see inside. Tell me what you’re feeling, Jenny would say. Give me your whole. But Shawna revels in the distance, the intoxicating unknown that sits always between two people.
There must have been a time, a reporter said to you once. A time before you were like this.
The feeling hit Lavender just in time: a love so consuming, it felt more like panic. The sensation was followed immediately by a nauseous, tidal guilt. Because Lavender knew, from the second she saw the baby, that she did not want this kind of love. It was too much. Too hungry.
Just you wait, honey. Men are wolves, and some wolves are patient.
This was how it always went, wasn’t it? All those women who’d come before her, in caves and tents and covered wagons. It was a wonder how she’d never given much thought to the ancient, timeless fact. Motherhood was, by nature, a thing you did alone.
It started small like that. Trivial, easy to ignore. A grunt from Johnny’s throat, an angry slammed door—a grip of the wrist, a flick on the ear. A palm, playfully smacking her cheek.
It was like she’d held her own desire too long in the palm of her hand and it was now just an object, devoid of meaning, useless and taking up space.
I wonder about choices. How we resent them, and how we regret them—even as we watch them grow.
Is she talking about the baby?
The new baby, a bundle of warm skin that she couldn’t bear to touch without feeling like she’d catch some disease. What disease, she didn’t know. But it would trap her here.
This will keep you safe, she had told him. It seemed unbearably cruel, that she could bestow such a promise then accidentally steal it away.
It is possible, looking at the ocean, to believe it never ends.
No one is all bad. No one is all good. We live as equals in the murky gray between.
You only remember a rusty chain, pooled in the dent of your collarbone, and how you felt wearing it, like nothing could touch you.
In most of your memories, your mother is gone. And before she is gone, always, she is leaving.
Saffy huddled beneath her scratchy pink comforter and reveled in the exquisite aloneness as the house shifted, exhaled.
This book is so beautifully written
She did not dare move, in case this melting decided—like everything did—to leave her all alone.
she thought how sad it was that a single bad thing could turn you into a story, a matter to be whispered about.
The bad lived insistently in your blood, a part of you always, calling out like a magnet to the horror of the world.
For the entirety of her life, Jenny’s name would echo across a room, and Hazel would turn, ready to answer.
We are created by what has happened to us, combined with who we choose to be.
who learned how to banish Baby Packer’s screaming any other way.
I have always suspected he killed the baby
In this almost-world—the substitute reality that lingered like a daydream—Izzy was never a pile of bones on a table. She was bright and golden, a blazing instant of mundane and perfect glory.
Even as the surety rushed through her veins, Saffy could not speak of the fox. She had never told anyone what Ansel had done, how that corpse had globbed onto her bedsheets—it felt too raw, too personal to divulge. The incident lived inside her, a private bubble of shame that she poked on her worst days, just to see if it had changed shape. It never did.
An interesting demonstration of trauma
It was a specific feeling, a case breaking open. A heady rush, like water surging through a dam, or ripe fruit splitting juicy down the middle.
As Saffy’s vision blurred and the room began to spin, she glimpsed a shadow of the thing she did not realize she’d been chasing. It felt like a breath of oxygen, even as she gasped for air—it felt like a younger, freer self, one who cared significantly less about survival. She had missed that danger. She had missed that liberation.
Saffy recognized the monster in her own body. A wild creature, reaching out hungry, starving for annihilation.
She glimpsed that same craving in Jenny Fisk—an ask, for suffering. It was the scariest thing about being a woman. It was hardwired, ageless, the part that knew you could have the good without the hurt, but it wouldn’t be nearly as exquisite.
Omggggggg this writing
“Oh, Lavender,” Cheryl said. “Ansel was never our child. He was yours.”
She found it difficult to picture him sitting there, committing his thoughts to paper—it seemed more like a show than a genuine endeavor, a way for Ansel to remind himself of his own middling intellectualism.
It was this. Men like Lawson, who believed their very existences afforded them lawlessness. Men who had been handed the world, trashed it, and still demanded more.
Diversity initiative. This was the first Saffy had heard of such a thing. It was true that, at thirty-nine, she was the youngest BCI captain appointed in years, that she was the only woman, and the only person of color, ever to hold the position within Troop B. But her stats had gotten her the title. By the time she’d risen to lieutenant, Saffy had the highest arrest record in the state.
It took a certain privilege to invite a man like Ansel into your world. To trust so freely. In the entirety of her life, Saffy had never once felt that sort of safety.
Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.
Grief was a hole. A portal to nothing. Grief was a walk so long Hazel forgot her own legs. It was a shock of blinding sun. A burst of remembering: sandals on pavement, a sleepy back seat, nails painted on the bathroom floor. Grief was a loneliness that felt like a planet.
Lavender knew, then, that the world was a forgiving place. That every horror she had lived or caused could be balanced with such gutting kindness. It would be a tragedy, she thought—inhumane—if we were defined only by the things we left behind.
You have known, of course, that this moment would arrive, but you did not expect it to feel so trivial, just another second blending with the millions that make up your insignificant little life.
Justice does not feel like compensation. It does not even feel like satisfaction. As Saffy takes a long breath of alpine air, she pictures the needle, pressing into Ansel’s arm. The blue pop of vein. How unnecessary, she thinks. How pointless. The system has failed them all.
He gets the attention. He gets the media, the discourse, the carefully regulated procedure. Real punishment would look different, Hazel knows—like a lonely, epic nothing. A life sentence in a men’s prison, the years rotting as they pass. The long forgetting of his name. A heart attack or a slip in the shower, the sort of faceless death he deserves. Instead, Ansel has been given this noble sacrifice. Martyr status. Hazel feels guilty, complicit in the process. She sees the constant stream of Black men on the evening news, shot by police as they’re stopped for broken taillights, hauled into
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There are millions of men out there who want to hurt women—people seem to think that Ansel Packer is extraordinary, because he actually did.
How absurd. A death like this—sterile, regulated, watched from a box—is just death. She has no idea to what extent it serves as punishment.
The tragedy is that she is dead, but the tragedy is also that she belongs to him. The bad man, who did the bad thing.
