More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
No one warned you in medical school that this was how you learned how to be a real doctor—humiliation and vomit.
Lemuel Ward was one of the most self-involved assholes Sara had ever met, which was saying a lot considering she had spent her adult life working in medicine.
“Tessie, you’ve been married for six months. If you’re not happy with him now—”
They both knew how the system worked, and it rarely favored the people who didn’t have money.
“What’s an edema?” “A collection of fluid in the tissue or cavities of the body.” Sara told the jury, “It’s basically swelling. You injure yourself—like you bump your knee on your desk. The body sends fluid as a way of saying, ‘Hey, be careful with your knee while I try to repair it.’”
“We classify a wound as a laceration when the muscle, tissue or skin is cut open or torn. From a forensic standpoint, they are classified as split, stretched, compressed, torn, or chopped.”
superficial means that it’s not deep,” Sara answered. “So, bleeding, but not requiring sutures. The blood would eventually coagulate and the wound would heal on its own.”
“A bruise occurs when an injury causes blood to leak into the skin or the tissue behind the skin. Over time, the leaked blood loses oxygen and starts to change color. This process can take a few hours or a few days. That’s when you see the blue, purple, or even black color. Dani’s bruises were red in color. In my opinion—” Sara caught Fanning’s pen moving yet again. “—the color indicates the bruises were at least an hour old. Possibly more.”
The moon was a fingernail sliver.
“It’s funny how you never meet a white supremacist who’s also a feminist.”
He often forgot how tiny she was. Sitting on the edge of the chair, she looked small enough to fit in his pocket, if he was the type of man who would put a live scorpion in his pocket.
One good thing about growing up in state care was that it taught you people had to figure out their own shit. You couldn’t do it for them.
Sometimes, the world could make you feel so numb that the only emotion that could cut through was pain.
“You can’t live like a monk,” Cathy said. “You will never succeed as a doctor if you don’t succeed as a human being.”
you will eventually reach a point where that tight control you have over every single aspect of your life is going to fail spectacularly. Something is bound to happen. And it might be good, or it might be bad, but you’ll learn something from it. And that is a profound opportunity. Change tells you who you really are.”
no captions to put names to the Botoxed faces.
Faith said, “All the plastic surgery in the world can’t erase that kind of evil.”
what does that give us?” “Leverage,” Faith said. “People will do anything to hide their secrets, whether it’s a gambling problem or a lawsuit or whatever. They’ll talk to us because they’ll be worried that we’ll start talking about them.”
When you were on the road to becoming a highly successful man, your wife ran the essential domestic parts of your life. When you were a woman on the road to success, you either lived in squalor or relied on your family.
For once, Sara didn’t care that she was crying. There was no greater gift than a child’s life.
that’s you inside of their heart. You’re the one who made that possible. It gives you an unbelievably intimate connection to another person’s life.”
She had a pathological need to believe in him, and Mac had a pathological need to be worshipped.”
I kind of didn’t care. He never made me crazy. I never felt like I was going to explode if we were in the same room and I wasn’t touching him.”
The club gave Britt entrée into a life that she would not otherwise have. She would feel safe here. Sara was about to destroy that.
Older, skin the color of tobacco from decades of exposure to the sun.
Everybody hated cops until they needed one.
Sara fought the urge to move away from him. When they were living together, Mason had often lied about trivial things, embellishing stories, covering his faults. This was different. He was lying to protect either himself or someone else.
Sara had lost count of the number of times that he’d tried to warn her off.
He could’ve easily shared Richie’s contact card from his phone. What did he have written on the card that he didn’t want her to see? She asked, “While you’re at it, do you mind writing down the names of anyone you remember? Not just from that night, but from any night.”
“And your cop with the big dick who got your ring from a bubblegum machine—does he take you seriously?” “He can take me any way he wants.”
Faith kept her mouth shut, but her expression apparently didn’t get the memo.
A doctor would never talk to an orthopod about medicine.” Faith was confused. “Aren’t they doctors, too?” “Yes, but—” Sara looked embarrassed. “They’re very good at sawing bones and driving in screws but if there’s a serious complication, you want someone who understands internal medicine. And which direction is up on an ECG.” Will was nodding. “It’s like asking a carpenter to fix your computer.”
“What about Eugene Edgerton? Why did he tank the investigation?” “He was corrupt.” Will didn’t have any qualms dissing a bad cop. “He either disappeared the case because he was incompetent, or he disappeared the case because he was paid off.”
And I’ve got Amanda’s support. I don’t get second-guessed a lot.” Faith would’ve laughed if anybody else had said that Amanda was supportive, but the truth was she always had their backs. Even if she sometimes did it at knifepoint. “What about the thing on Merit’s side, the tattoo?”
Faith felt her hackles go up. “He said that—that she moved on? Like it was nothing?” “Everyone handles it differently,” Sara said. “There’s no right or wrong way. There could be some women who feel it was inconsequential.” “There could be some women who walk on Mars one day.”
Faith thought of her children again, how her biggest worry with Jeremy was that he would fall in love with a girl who broke his heart and her biggest fear with Emma was that she would fall in love with a man who broke her bones. Or worse.
They both had a shared history that neither of them particularly wanted. They both knew how to hurt each other in ways that Britt could never dream of.
“I’m sorry that Mason won’t help you.” His jaw was set again. “Even if he’s not involved, he knows something’s going on, and he’s choosing to look the other way.”
Sara felt a sudden swell of emotion. This was the miracle of her recovery. She trusted with every fiber of her being that Will would always be there.
Let denial blunt memory’s razor-sharp edges. Let the passage of time give you some distance. Then, when you were ready to face what happened, the cuts wouldn’t feel so deep.
“The current incel movement is the main cog driving the online male supremacist machine. Mostly white, mostly young, all males, all expressing hatred, misogyny, self-pity, self-loathing, a sense of entitlement to sex, a love of violence against women, and the obligatory side of racism.”
“When you’re part of a group, it’s hard being the only person who disagrees with what the group is doing.
“Not to mention they can turn on you. People who are doing bad things don’t like being told they’re doing bad things. You call them out on their bullshit, they’ll try to destroy you.”
Will stood up. He towered over Leo. He was younger and fitter and he didn’t have failure wafting off him like a wet fart.
Faith was incredulous. “What the hell does that even mean?” “I’m a big guy with a gun on my belt. If something bad happened to her, she’d be relieved to see me because she knows that means she’s safe.” Faith hadn’t heard anything this stupid in weeks. “Did it ever occur to you that a woman might feel scared because the man who raped her was a big guy with a gun?”
Men often assumed that women only dressed up to attract men when the fact was that sometimes women wanted to look shit-hot for themselves. It was a kind of armor against the world.
“Fine.” Leighann sat back in her chair, arms crossed. Her hostility was like a third person in the room. “I already told Shitlips what happened. I was at the club. My memory blanks after that. Literally. I woke up under a hedge. Do you really need to hear it again?”
Sara closed her eyes at the thought of Leighann’s panic. She knew what it was like to realize that your body no longer belonged solely to you. “Rubbing alcohol would be better.”
Sara was uniquely qualified to understand.
This was nearly twenty years ago. There’s no way anyone would’ve believed me.” Sara knew that the passage of time hadn’t changed that much. Everyone called it he said/she said, as if a woman’s word carried the same weight as a man’s.
