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It’s been a long day, that’s all.” “Sloane, you’ve been here less than an hour.” “Fine. It’s been a long week.” “It’s literally Monday.”
WebMD was happy to supply me with any number of worst-case scenarios,
I, unfortunately, had never been accused of being too smart. Too inquisitive? Yes. Too pushy? Obviously. Too much? Always.
We bonded, in a way. Pain will do that, even if you’re the only one feeling it.”
In my experience, telling anyone—especially a man with as little patience as this one—to calm down rarely resulted in anything but an increase of hostilities.
“It’s not fair, but pit bulls have to be extra careful about everything in this life. Smaller, cuter dogs can growl and snap. Elegant, well-groomed dogs can tear apart the furnishings and suffer no consequences. But you have to watch everything you say and do, or the world will put you down without a second thought.”
But the only thing I’d been able to glean from the book was mothers were one hell of a gift in this world, and we all just fucking wasted them.
In many ways, every death was separated by a lifetime. There was before and there was after, and the only thing that linked them was a wisp of a memory that seemed to be fading with every passing day.
She was in every book I’d ever read, every tale that had ever touched my heart. Fiction and nonfiction, memoir and short story—no matter what I read, I always found her.
‘She makes me love her and I like people who make me love them. It saves me so much trouble in making myself love them.’”
This world was a terrible place. It gave you people to love and then took them away before you stopped loving them. It made you mean and angry and cruel to those who needed you most. It ground you down until it was all you could do to get through the day. But most of all, it tried to convince you that you were alone in your suffering.
“There she is,” he murmured. “I knew you had a big and bright life burning somewhere inside you.”
Life was calling to me—it had been calling to me for years—but it had taken this random, beautiful collection of people for me to realize what I had to do. It was time for me to answer.
