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Darling, she’s a dog, not a child, she’d said on numerous occasions. Iona was quite aware of that. Children these days were rather selfish, lazy, and entitled, she thought.
most endings turned out to be beginnings in disguise.
She’d noticed him because of his exquisite tailoring, which ordinarily she would have admired, but it was rather ruined by an extraordinary sense of entitlement that only really comes with being white, male, heterosexual, and excessively solvent. This was evidenced by his penchant for manspreading, and talking extremely loudly on his mobile phone about the markets and positions. She’d once heard him refer to his wife as the ball and chain.
they didn’t want to be her friends, just her protectors, and their suffocating concern only made her feel weaker and more pathetic. More of a target.
“But that’s not the way today’s youth-obsessed society views me, is it? Anyone over the age of fifty is deemed irrelevant, it seems. Dinosaurs.”
It was so easy—when you spent the majority of your waking hours in the harsh, artificial light and brutally sanitized interiors of a London hospital—to forget how healing the outdoors could be.
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple . . .
what is the point of being alive if you go through life unnoticed,
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, Iona had said, look like a victim, become a target.
“If you give up, they win, darling,” she’d said. “They want us to be small, so we have to stand tall. They want us to be invisible, so we have to be seen. They want us to be quiet, so we have to be heard. They want us to surrender, so we have to fight.”
“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.”
