Love Practically (The Penn-Leiths of Thistle Muir, #1)

by Nichole Van

With every passing year, Leah felt herself pushed more and more to the fringes of her loved ones’ lives, moving from the caretaker of their happiness to a mere spectator of it.

Loving a child was an odd thing, he decided. He would happily give up his life for Madeline. But sacrificing the quiet of his library to listen to her incessant questions? Perhaps not.

“Happiness is what we make of our situation, not what the situation intrinsically is,”

life often comes as more fractured particles of joy, just wee bits of heaven. The trick is to be content with the number you’ve been given.

Leah, as women were wont to do from time immemorial, was rather obnoxiously chipper, finding unnatural joy in the collective misery of her menfolk.

Joy and grief are two sides of the same coin. Ye cannae have one without the other. It’s foolishness in the extreme tae be so consumed by the possibility of loss that ye miss the joy of love entirely. Sorrow means the heart loved true.”

“Death is an amputation.” He fixed her with haunted eyes. “A violent severing of a vital part of ye. It throbs like a phantom limb, pulsing with a pain that nothing can soothe.”

“Life is short, sister. Love hard and true . . . while ye still have time.”

She quietly inserted herself into one’s life and silently went about improving things, until one day, you realized everything was better for her presence.