There Is No Devil (Sinners, #2)

by Sophie Lark

Opposing Cole feels like standing in the path of a freight train. Yet here I stand, staring down the headlights as the horn blares in warning.

The more intimate and personal my work, the more it frightens me for other people to see it. Especially people who know me. Paradoxical as it seems, I’d rather strangers view it, because they won’t know how deeply self-referential my work has become. They won’t recognize how I’ve opened myself up, guts and all, laying myself bare across the canvas.

What feels safe and what will actually keep you safe from harm are quite different from one another. It’s not difficult to distract ourselves from the problem

She’s throwing it in my face, the intense connection I had to her. The love to which I clung no matter what she said to me, no matter what she did. It took years longer for that love to wither and die. Even now, some perverse remnant endures, lodged deep in my guts. I still think about her. I still yearn for what I wanted her to be.

the world is a morass of incompetence, everyone playing dress-up at their jobs. Are there any actual adults? Or just children that grew tall?

Mara is my other half. Not my twin, but the parts of me that were missing. I always thought the sense of emptiness that plagued me was the reality of the human condition. I never imagined the hole inside of me could be filled by someone else. In all my arrogance, I missed a basic truth that other people already understood: Everything is better when you share it with someone else.