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No one ever tells you how complicated it is being a parent. How much energy it sucks out of you. The toll it takes on a marriage. Somehow simply growing up in a family isn’t such great preparation for having your own.
Even if you think you’ve done everything to keep them safe, it’s never enough. Because the world is an awful place, full of evil.
There’s no crime in Stanhope. It’s a small place. Safe as houses. Until it isn’t.
It must be hard, he thinks, realizing you’ve been sleeping with a murderer. That you’re in love with a monster.
It hasn’t been easy; it feels like each day is a struggle against temptation. Sometimes the pressure, the tension, is too much.
Where is the humanity in that? Where is the fairness, the justice? What about her rights, and her daughter’s? It’s fine to be a defense attorney and do your job, until you look at it from other eyes—from the eyes of a mother whose child has been taken by a monster.
She knows that it’s not necessarily the ones who seem different that you need to be afraid of—it’s the ones who can carry off normal without anyone suspecting a thing.
Maybe that’s what hell is, other people,
She thinks about her interactions with William Wooler, the Blanchards, and now Derek. Everyone here is lying, she thinks.
Grown-ups shouldn’t let missing girls stay in their basement while the whole world is looking for them.
They were brought up by the same parents, in the same household, yet they couldn’t be more different.
She’s not happy that Ryan Blanchard is in jail. This was supposed to be about making her dad suffer.
Everything’s gone completely to hell anyway. He thinks about what his wife said, how she thinks he’s a child killer. He could never harm an innocent child. But he could strangle his wife.
Maybe she saw something in him that he hadn’t even realized was there.
It occurs to him that maybe she can’t really recognize love.
Because she a psycopath!!
Manipulative—because she left out that he begged for her forgiveness? Why shouldn’t she leave that out? Why do men always think they should be forgiven? That they only have to ask? Maybe what he thinks is relevant is not what her daughter and she and millions of other girls and women think is relevant. So he begged for forgiveness—so what? That makes it all right? And now he’s trying to discredit their daughter—don’t believe everything she says—because that’s how he sees the world, through his male bias.
