Holly (Holly Gibney #3)

by Stephen King

Forty is when you have to stop kidding yourself that you’re still a young anything. If you don’t—if you subscribe to such self-actualizing bullshit as “forty is the new twenty-five”—you’re going to find yourself starting to slide. Just a little at first, but then a little more, and all at once you’re fifty with a belly poking out your belt buckle and cholesterol-busters in the medicine cabinet. At twenty, the body forgives. At forty, forgiveness is provisional at best.

He considers shouting to be let out, but what would that accomplish? Do you put someone in a basement cage (it must be the basement) with a puke bucket and a Porta-John if you mean to come running down the stairs at the first shout, saying Sorry, sorry, big mistake?

Here is another relationship chilled by the fast-talking man in the red tie. It’s not fate and not coincidence.

What you don’t want to do is what must be done first. Then it’s out of the way.

You believe that, Holly thinks. You believe it to your very soul, because you’re a holder-onner, and holder-onners are never able to understand let-goers. They are tribes that just can’t understand each other. Sort of like vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, Trumpers and Never Trumpers.

“Gifts are fragile. You must never entrust yours to people who might break it.”

She wishes her friend—who once saved her life and Bill’s life in a snowstorm—could always be this happy, and knows that’s not the way life works. Maybe just as well. If it did, happiness wouldn’t mean anything.