When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie, #3)

by Kate Atkinson

“Morris says that you should have nothing in your house that you don’t know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,”

The school was the kind of place that Louise had spent her red-flagged life railing against—privilege, the perpetuation of the ruling hegemony, yada, yada, yada. And now she was subscribing to it because the greater good wasn’t an argument she was going to deploy when it came to her own flesh and blood. “What about your principles?” someone said to her, and she said, “Archie is my principles.”

She already had a child, a child who was wrapped around her heart, and she couldn’t walk on that wild shore again.

Louise had been there, been there with Archie when he was little, at the empty play parks and deserted duck ponds, suddenly aware of the nutter’s sloping walk, his shifting gaze. Don’t make eye contact. Walk past briskly, don’t draw attention to yourself. Somewhere, in some Utopian nowhere, women walked without fear. Louise would sure like to see that place. Give medals to all the women.

“Who made you the voice of wisdom?” Louise said, but only in her head, because the love of a good man wasn’t something to be thrown away like a piece of paper.

There were a lot of ways of getting lost, not all of them involved being missing. Not all of them involved hiding. Sometimes women got lost right there in plain sight.

She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a blind pigeon to stick back together again.

Sadie whined impatiently. She had heard the word walk several sentences ago and still nothing had happened.

Just because you were a rational and skeptical atheist didn’t mean that you didn’t have to get through every day the best way you could. There were no rules.

What was the point of phones if no one ever answered them?