What You Did Quotes

“We always think we want to know secrets, but what we forget is that they come with their own weights, heavy as millstones, and if you aren’t careful this weight can crush you.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“It was the details that mattered when the entire world had fallen apart.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“If I’d learned anything from these last weeks, it was that it wasn’t possible to save everyone. You just had to pick someone, and save them, and let the rest drown.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“No one ever tells you that this is the downside of giving your kids everything you never had – they turn into spoiled little brats.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“when you think you’ve lost it all, there is still more that can be taken from you.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“There is a certain feeling when the worst happens, and the bottom falls out of your world, and you somehow pick yourself up from that and stabilise, adjust. There is another feeling when you suddenly find out this is not the worst, not by a long way.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“But what we don’t understand is that love can turn on a dime. We don’t know how easy it is to feel it flip over to a dark side, cold and dead, like the moon spinning on its axis.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“Bill took Cassie home. He said he’d get Benji from school, and feed him too: ‘Though I don’t know what I can make. Does he like soused herring?’ I was so grateful. I was already trying to imagine in my head how I could thank him, and failing. Karen would normally have done these things. It was she who’d come when I was having Benji, when my father finally died and I had to spend a week at my mother’s, when Mike broke his ankle running and I was back and forth to hospital for three days. I wondered where she was and what she was doing. I imagined her in a flat maybe, with the kind of scuffed and bland furniture you found in cheap hotels. We’d helped women get into them from time to time. Now it was someone I knew going through this. I still couldn’t take it in. Karen accusing Mike. Jake stabbing Mike. I remembered the little boy who’d throw his arms round me. I love you, Auntie Ali. The way he’d sat at the table and cried, so quietly, when I told him we were moving away. It was never really the same after that. I saw him running at us, the knife flashing, Cassie in his path. My head was twisted, full of blood and lies and screams. I told myself I just had to get through this. Mike just had to survive, and then we’d sort it all out”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“again. Chapter Thirty-One Here’s what my life had become. My husband was in the intensive care ward of the hospital, clinging to life. And my daughter was in the psychiatric ward of the same building, having had her stomach pumped after my mother found her slumped in her bedroom, a packet of tranquillisers scattered beside her. The same ones my mother had been taking for most of my childhood. The ones that made it easier to turn a blind eye to what our home had become. There would be”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“Oxbridge stream,’ mimicked Jake. ‘Since when does that make someone not a tosser? Look at this lot.’ He and Cassie were back in the swing seat, with the bottle of wine Cassie had pilfered while her parents were busy fussing over their guests. Would anyone like an amuse-bouche? Or even some crisps? Dinner’s a little held up, sorry. Cassie’s mum was so anxious all the time. For someone who didn’t really work, she seemed mega stressed. Who cared what time dinner was at? It wasn’t even dark yet. The grown-ups, six of them, were sitting round the wooden picnic table. On one bench were Callum and Jodi, like a massive marshmallow. On the other were her parents, her mum looking round her anxiously every few minutes, at the kitchen, or at Cassie, or the living room where Benji was playing Xbox.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“as well as my university friends for not being like the ones in this book.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“It had been our creed back then – make sure your friends get home safe. Call them a taxi. Always our responsibility to keep ourselves safe, never the men’s not to hurt us.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“You aren’t allowed to say it but your wedding is perilously close to a licence to let out the selfish little diva inside all of us. It says to girls – you won’t matter any more, not after this, so for today you get to matter the most.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“The things we don’t know about our friends. The things we don’t ask.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“But still, the thing that was between them, it did not go away, it did not die, it just kept getting hungrier and hungrier, and sometimes the sheer power of it, of knowing she would do anything for it, hit her like a wave. It was wrong. But sometimes that didn’t matter.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“She”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“eyes looked now as well. Cassie said, in a small”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“He found his phone: no messages. A feeling of desolation came over him,”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“then gone right away.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“even when you think you’ve lost it all, there is still more that can be taken from you.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“Who cares what people think? You don’t know them. I hate all this, this social media mob. We aren’t meant to know what other people think in this level of detail.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“We aren’t meant to know what other people think in this level of detail.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“Mike. He just slipped.’ I hesitated. ‘But Karen, you know that’s not true. You were worried yourself. Remember?’ A few years ago, she’d taken Jake to a psychiatrist, concerned about the amount of time he spent in his room, his lack of friends, his sullen manner.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“for”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“I knew now that shame could corrode a life right down to the bones.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“Always our responsibility to keep ourselves safe, never the men’s not to hurt us.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“All this time I’d been waiting for someone to take charge, and it seemed now that someone was me.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“Will they need lunch?”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“Twenty-five years gone, lost like something dropping out of my pocket.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did

“I hate all this, this social media mob. We aren’t meant to know what other people think in this level of detail.”
― Claire McGowan, What You Did