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Two minutes later if she was wearing the Louboutins.
In her experience, most endings turned out to be beginnings in disguise.
Last week, he’d noted that she was reading a novel called Rebecca, so he’d bought himself a copy from his local bookshop, and read the first few chapters over the weekend. Which meant that today, presuming she was still reading it, he could ask her what she thought of Mrs. Danvers.
she was confronted with her own sense of mortality. The realization that one day, totally out of the blue, you could go from being a happy, healthy person to . . . not being at all.
Yet here she was, at twenty-nine, doing nothing that would even remotely change her corner of Thames Ditton, let alone the world, and sitting idly by while people choked to death.
Over the years she’d secretly mocked the life choices of her contemporaries, as—one by one—they’d pulled over onto the hard shoulder of the career expressway, in favor of popping out one child after another and pandering to the needs of ungrateful, selfish
husbands who’d once looked passably handsome but had grown beer bellies, nose hair, and fungal toenails.
and she wondered if, just maybe, they were winning after all.
Did all that shock and grief seep into the soft furnishings? He imagined it oozing out of the cushions and curtains, a toxic, viscous sludge gradually filling the room and drowning him.
What use was a cancer nurse with a fear of death?
She was an observer, studying a foreign species, trying to work out their habits and rituals, so she could move among them without being rejected or picked on. Did other teenagers do this naturally? Or were they all struggling to work out the rules? The rules that always seemed to change just as soon as you had them all figured out.
where it lurked like a malignant tumor to be excised at a later date,
Sometimes fate just shows you the way to go and you have no option but to follow.
“Darling, what is the point of being alive if you go through life unnoticed, without standing out and making waves?
so she could pull out the scene and relive it whenever she needed to.
Perhaps creating her own family with Toby would finally heal that wound.
Not like a mother and daughter, because those relationships were complicated. More like aunt and niece.
Some endings were just brutally, unjustly final.
“I prefer spending time with adults, actually,” said Martha. “Conversation with adults is easy. I know the rules. Shake hands with a firm, confident grip. Introduce yourself. Maintain eye contact. Avoid controversial topics and don’t swear.
She’d always believed that adults knew all the answers, and that only she was trying to navigate through life without the requisite instruction manual. But it was becoming increasingly obvious that they were often as lost as she was.
“No woman is anyone’s ‘other half.’ We are all entire people. Completely whole, and totally unique. But sometimes when you put two very different whole people together, a kind of magic, an alchemy, occurs.
When the thing you’ve feared for so long actually happens, you have nothing left to be scared of anymore.
Your past experiences, she’d explained, are the foundations on which you build your future. Build them on pride, not shame. Denying your history leaves your house standing on sand, always in danger of collapsing.
How can you tell the difference between concern and control?
Emmie went through all the usual motions on autopilot. She felt as if she were rerunning an old movie of herself, shot in very different times. The image looked like her, but it was two-dimensional and flimsy.
In a room where the air was usually thick with a palpable sense of disease and distress, the bell always provided a momentary but welcome interlude of joy and hope.
“When the shit hits the fan, as it does in any relationship at some point, it’s the friendship that gets you through, not the sex.
“The only way to be guaranteed of failure, dear boy, is not to try,” said Iona. “Love is the greatest risk of all, but a life without it is meaningless.”
The only other person she knew who’d memorized the entire periodic table in order and loved Daphne du Maurier.
“What do you think of Mrs. Danvers?” asked Sanjay but, just like the last time
