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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table. —W. H. Auden
feeling too much empathy threatens Jane’s grip on her own emotions. She can’t afford to crack. She’d split open, and her guts would spill all over the place—she’s not sure she’d ever be able to gather the parts back into her skin if she did.
anything and will be of no help to her. “It’s like you can’t even grieve,” Christopher says. “Grieving feels like a betrayal, like you’ve given up. Meanwhile the whole world just starts to move on without you.”
Sometimes I even think I see her on the SkyTrain, and my heart races before my brain can even engage.
And—” He heaves out a big sigh. “Anger. I am so quick to enrage, and I take it out on people who are only trying to help. But no one can ever say the right thing, can they?”
We live in a society that places high value on resolving problems, on finding solutions, on ‘getting over’ things quickly. But when society is faced with people who are missing, there’s a disconnect, a discomfort. They don’t know how to cope with people who are missing loved ones, or with situations that actually have no answers or resolutions. We should not be forced to chase closure,” she warns. “What we need to find are ways to coexist with our complex feelings, and to always remember that our reactions are completely normal.” She glances at Jane. “They’re not a sign of personal weakness.”
This does not sit at all well with Jane. She’s a fixer.
It’s taken a lifetime to reach this place of contentment, of self-acceptance. It almost makes up for her traumatizing teen years and her ensuing shambles of a marriage.
Bile surges into Mason’s throat, and sweat pools under his arms. Not clean sweat. The kind that smells acrid. The stink of fear.
Jane suddenly feels nine years old again, and as much as her mom irritates her, the buried little girl inside also craves being held and comforted and told it will all turn out okay.
There is no such thing as true altruism in Cara’s opinion. No person ever acts purely selflessly because humans are fundamentally wired to be self-interested. It’s basic survival instinct. Those who do charity are self-interested in their own godly salvation. They seek to be seen doing good. They crave admiration from their peers. Or they want to soothe some unarticulated guilt over their own privilege or wrongdoing.
He holds her gaze, and suddenly Cara feels an indefinable chill rise in the space between them. They might not be that couple, but Cara knows her entire relationship with Bob was founded on a terrible secret. And more. Bob doesn’t know she has a secret lie of her own, and if it weren’t for her lie, none of it would have happened. Her lie set it all in motion.
Cara feels sick. Having Rocco in their past is knowing there’s a loaded and cocked gun out there all the time, and it’s aimed at them.
Just like the lines in tree trunks, our lives are written into our bones. And if you know how to read them”—she glances at her students—“they speak.
“What if one of them is lying?” Jill says, even more softly, “We all lied about that night, Cara.” “We all lied to the police. But what if we also lied to each other?”
She told me to be careful. She doesn’t know the half of it. Sometimes real danger is invisible to people on the outside. Sometimes the danger
A slight smile, like she has a secret.
Jane is only beginning to understand just how deeply a wound can slice into the life of someone whose loved one drops out of sight and sound, and how permanent that wound could be, how long one might have to wait, and wait, and wait for a resolution that never comes.
She feels so alone, so isolated, after all these years in her own kind of prison—locked behind the bars of grief.
Ice hockey in particular is a game of privilege with huge barriers to entry,
As her milestone birthday landed, she was besieged by a mortifying sense that her entire existence was built on falsehoods. Lies. Especially lies to herself about herself. Mary was either going to crash and burn like a comet hitting Earth’s atmosphere, or she needed to speak truth to herself, and about herself. And that’s what she did.
Annalise’s words snake through her brain. “I know why you’re with Claude, Mary. I know why you do it with him all the time. You’re a lesbian, that’s why. You’re gay and you are too scared to admit it. And you think if everyone knows you’re having sex with Claude Betancourt, they won’t see the truth. Even Claude says so.”
Not only that, Claude, her boyfriend, just screwed her best friend at the party and said awful things that undermine Mary’s self-worth and self-identity and everything she’s trying to hold on to.
The empath in her is suddenly at war with her drive for self-preservation. She’s always been too trusting, a people pleaser. It’s a big fault of hers. She’ll do almost anything to keep others happy, things that end up being really bad for her.
She goes cold. Her brain reels as she tries to imagine how this could play out.
This realization feeds a dark and secret place in her. It stirs a hunger for revenge.
When people don’t have answers, they try to make them up, fill the gaps in the brain.
No gravity can stop things now. No one knows where all the broken pieces will land or what will be damaged in the fallout. The sense of impending doom is thick.
His gaze flares to her. “D’you think people act rationally when they kill someone? Especially if they didn’t mean to? Do you have any idea the kind of terror that comes with something like that? When your hands are full of all that blood and you don’t know what to do?”
A bitter little seed cracks open inside Cara. It oozes out hatred and hurtfulness, and it feeds into her veins.
The need to belong is a basic survival instinct more powerful than logic. Biologically it can override the most rational of thinking.
Whether it comes from the law or not, retribution has already found her. It’s found each and every one of them.
He also can’t understand why Annalise was ready to go steady with him yet not sleep with him, especially if it’s true that she had sex repeatedly with his friends. It’s confusing. It hurts. Even now.
The things we do, for our children—to keep them safe, to atone for our own childhood sins, when inside our aging bodies we’re all really just still frightened and bullied children ourselves . . .
But all Claude has really done is stave off what he’s always known deep down is inevitable: That one day there would come the hard, cold knock at his door. He’d open it, and she’d be standing there holding her scales, hiding behind her blindfold, not seeing all the atonement work he’s been doing. And she’d ask him to pay.
Should she be forgiven? What does forgiveness really mean?
She said something to the effect, danger is not so obvious. It’s the danger you can’t see coming that you should really fear.”
A dark kind of stringy blackness and noise begins to scribble over the images trying to form in Faith’s head—like a child’s angry drawing with black crayon over a picture, erasing the memories before they can even be properly seen. It happens every time Faith tries to recall things from her childhood. A bad feeling creeps up her throat as snatches of sound and slices of images struggle to cut into her mind.
But Faith worried. And the worst part was that Faith felt she knew all the answers even as her mind hid them for her.
Her gaze locks on his. Knox senses a calculating mind behind those deceptively warm eyes.
That need to belong as a teen is so powerful, Jill thinks. It’s wired into human biology. To be cast out from a herd in the wild is to be rendered vulnerable, weak. You become the victim for circling prey. Being inside her group, being part of a pledge, knowing a dark secret about life and death that only the six of them shared—it defined Jill and empowered her.
In the context of ambiguous loss, “closure” is a myth . . . We should not be forced to chase closure. What we need to find are ways to coexist with our complex feelings, and to always remember that our reactions are completely normal. They’re not a sign of personal weakness.
“I’m sorry. I really don’t know what overcame me.” “Emotion is not weakness, Jane. Empathy is not soft. It’s what makes us most human. Most strong.” She pauses. “It’s why I loved your father. And you are his daughter. Just as strong. Just as kind. And being a woman doesn’t mean you should fight harder to appear cold and professional. We need to change
