Amber

“I think I’ve found something. Was Deb wearing white trainers?”

“Yeah? Maybe? I can’t remember”

“Because I’m in the river and I think I’ve found one of Deb’s shoes. It is possible she may have drowned?”

“What?”

“Well, in films, when you find someone’s shoe on a riverbank, it’s usually because they’re dead.”

“Maybe she just kicked them off and went for a dip to cool off.”

“Where’s the other shoe, then?”

On her corpse obviously, according to my overactive imagination.
“Send me picture of the shoe, maybe. I’m sure it’s fine, Rodney”

I look down at the photo Rodney sent over to me “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” I hit dial.

“Hello, Rodney speaking! How can I help?”

“What? Rodney, it’s Dylan. That shoe. It’s a man’s shoe. Obviously. What size does it say on the bottom?”

“Eleven. Oh! Does Deb have very big feet?”

“No, Rodney, she doesn’t.”

“Great! It’s someone else who must’ve drowned, then. I’ll get out of the river, in that case.”

“You’re… in the river? Actually in it”

“I’m trawling! For bodies! No need now though, if it isn’t Deb”

“Ok. Thanks, Rodney. Keep at it.”
― Beth O'Leary, The Road Trip

“I’m going to make you very glad you didn’t cut out my tongue.”
― Hannah Kaner, Faithbreaker

“Nobles like her couldn’t comprehend what it was to go out into the forest because your family needed food. They couldn’t comprehend what it was like to be too poor to afford element resistant garb or better tools to hunt or hire protection because if you could afford all of that you wouldn’t need to go out into the forest in the first place.

No, Natalia didn’t need a taste of the commoner’s life. What she wanted, what she’d always wanted, was the security of wealth. For some reason people who possessed such desires always seemed villainous. Never was such a label applied to those who had wealth and only remembered on occasion that others didn’t have it.”
― Elliot Brooks, Remnants of Dawn

“Katoomba police station either had a very comprehensive or a very lax understanding of the law, given how quickly they put me in a room with an accused murderer. I was slightly disappointed: I’d expected obstruction and had prepared a treatise on how someone in custody may invite a lawyer or a friend to consult, but there was no call for my recent education at Google University.”
― Benjamin Stevenson