The Record Keeper (Murphy Shepherd, #3)

by Charles Martin

bullets are like words—once they’ve left the barrel, you can’t take them back. And eternity is a long time.

Summer hadn’t just cared for me. She wasn’t simply my nurse. She’d become my very lifeline. She’d drawn the line in the sand and dared death to cross it, screaming at the top of her lungs, “If you want him, it will be over my dead body!” She was then and is now my defender. The lone figure who stared defiantly into the hurricane and sheltered me. Summer’s soot-stained shield was grooved with scars meant for me.

We didn’t know who we were, and more importantly, we didn’t know whose we were—forever proving that identity precedes purpose. You can’t know who you are until you’ve settled whose you are.

God himself actually thought me up. What you see in the lens of your eye, this thing we call ‘me,’ started in his mind. He actually took the time to think me up. Imagine.”

People in darkness don’t know they’re in darkness because it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s their world. They navigate primarily by bumping off things that are stronger. Immovable. They don’t know darkness is darkness until someone turns on a light. Only then does the darkness roll back like a scroll. It has to. Darkness can’t stand light. And it hasn’t. Not since God spoke it into existence. The problem comes when you turn on a light and find those in darkness who, having seen light, prefer the dark. Who retreat into the shadows to do their deeds in secret. They are the ashen-skinned, amber-eyed, fork-tongued servants of evil. Pawns who do the devil’s bidding.