Just the Nicest Couple Quotes

“The truth sometimes lies in what we don’t say, rather than what we say.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“A secret admirer. It’s not that much different than a stalker.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“My imagination is my worst enemy in this moment.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“Lily likes to feed the birds outside our house. She has two feeders in the backyard, which she hangs from hooks close to the trees and fills with seeds. She loves to stand at the back window and watch them. Even in the dead of winter, when the birds should have flown somewhere south, where it’s warm, I wake up to the sound of birdsong. The birds come in droves, and because of it, despite Lily’s best efforts, she can’t always keep up with feeding them. Eventually the feeders go dry and the birds disappear, and then the backyard becomes quiet and still. Days pass without seeing a bird so that you’d think they were long gone. Lily goes to the store. She gets more seed. She trudges outside, sometimes in the cold, sometimes through a foot of snow, to fill the feeders.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“The news puts this on because it’s what people want to see. It’s a sickness. It’s not that the world is innately bad or that bad things happen more often than good things. It’s that we’re drawn to bad things. Death sells.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“In an instant, your world can turn upside down when you’re least expecting it.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“Every day is like New Year’s Eve and waiting for the ball to drop. Except that when the ball does drop, we won’t be celebrating.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“When all this is said and done, Lily and Nina’s friendship will be over.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“NINA”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“It’s that we’re drawn to bad things. Death sells. I turn the news off. I hate watching”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“faraway,”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“By the end of the first day, she’d discovered that learning to be a teacher and being a teacher were two very different things. It was harder than she expected. Burnout was very real that first year.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“I decide to call the florist to see who sent me flowers. They sat on my desk staring at me half the day.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“not finding Jake’s car, I think of everything terrible that could have happened to Jake.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“So he was upset, then,” I suggest, and she nods, though Jake is a master at keeping his emotions at bay, of not letting on to what he’s thinking or feeling inside.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“I can imagine they’re not. Was Jake upset about it?” I ask, looking to Tricia, but again it’s Dr. Caddel who speaks. “With every surgery comes risk, which is why patients are required to give informed consent before we operate on them. Sometimes a surgeon can do everything right, the surgery can be incredibly routine, and still a patient dies. Despite his efforts, Dr. Hayes could not stop that particular patient from bleeding out. From what I’ve heard, the family was devastated and they took it out on Jake.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“It’s so unlike Jake,” Dr. Caddel says. “It is,” I say, because Jake is always so punctual and so conscientious. “How did he seem when he left?” I ask, my eyes going back to his nurse, Tricia. “Fine,” Tricia says, “for the most part. He had a difficult appointment in the morning, a follow-up meeting with the family of a patient who died.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“But then,” she says, “the next thing I knew, it was four o’clock. Dr. Hayes’s patient was here, but Dr. Hayes wasn’t.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“Was that unusual?” I ask. “For Jake to run out in the middle of the day?” She considers this. “Yes and no,” she says.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“Dr. Caddel tells me you were working with Jake on Monday.” She nods. “I was.” “Can you tell me anything about that day? Was it a typical day?” She thinks back. “Yes, for the most part. Dr. Hayes worked Monday morning as scheduled. But then around, I don’t know, maybe two or two thirty, he said that he needed to run out for a while and that he’d be back.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“haven’t been here before, I don’t think. But it strikes me now how Jake and I have the life that we share, and then we have entirely separate lives.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“I just hope that, wherever he is, he’s fine. Let me see if I can get Tricia, Dr. Hayes’s nurse, for you. I wasn’t working on Monday, but she can tell you more about what happened that day. The last I saw, she was in with a patient, but maybe she’s through.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“I love her eyes. They’re a rich, warm brown and always make me think of integrity and goodness.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“We're drawn to dark things, death sells!”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“I watch the news. I read things. I know that in the United States, women kill their husbands more than they do in almost any other country. For every one hundred men who kill their wives, there are something like seventy-five women who kill their husbands, if not more. Some people say it’s more like fifty-fifty. When men kill their wives, often it starts with some sort of psychological abuse. Stalking. Manipulation. Gaslighting. But when women do it, it’s usually because she’s already determined that she’s going to die if he doesn’t. But that’s not always the case. Women kill for different reasons other than fear or in self-defense. Sometimes they kill because they’re jealous, because they’re worried their spouse is going to leave them, for life insurance payouts, or some combination of the three.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“Years ago, a woman named Amanda Holmes also vanished in Langley Woods. She went missing from the area. I remember that she was twenty-two at the time, a senior in college. Her case was strange, the kind that captured national attention. It was all over the news. I followed her story at the time because it was interesting. I didn’t think it would ever matter to me on a more personal level. When Amanda first went missing, her car was found about a quarter mile from Langley Woods. There was a suicide note set on the dashboard. The search for her should have been cut-and-dried. It was anything but. Search parties looked for her for days that stretched into weeks. They used bloodhounds and then cadaver dogs to scavenge the woods and the residential areas around them. Even the dogs couldn’t find her. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people searched for Amanda, whose friends called her Mandy, by air and by foot. Her family was devastated. This was maybe five years ago. I remember at the time watching her parents cry on TV. I remember that months passed without finding her. Eventually everyone gave up. People stopped talking about Amanda Holmes. They came to believe that she wasn’t at Langley Woods or anywhere even close to it, that something else had happened to her, something far more mysterious and insidious, but no one knew what. There were theories, and unconfirmed reports of Amanda sightings all over the Chicagoland area and around the country. Had someone met her and driven her elsewhere? Was the suicide note just part of a cunning plan? Had she abandoned her life, her family, and was she living a new life somewhere else? But why? No one knew. The case went cold. A year passed and still she wasn’t found, until one day when some hikers stumbled upon her body in the woods. The medical examiner determined the cause of death: suicide. Amanda Holmes took her own life. She hung herself from a tree. She had been in these woods the whole time everyone was looking for her, and still no one could find her.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“People say kind things about Christian and Lily all the time. Everyone thinks they’re just the nicest couple.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“Darkness wraps its arms around me. The night air is cool. You can smell fall in the air, the earthy scent of things dying.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“Jake gave me an ultimatum: him or her. If I didn’t stop spending so much of my free time with my mother, he said, he would leave. He was jealous and also, I don’t think he’s ever been a huge fan of her. My mother can be outspoken at times and Jake didn’t like her putting ideas in my head. When we were both home, he wanted me all to himself, which meant on the weekends I could never visit her. It was okay.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“She doesn’t offer advice like other people feel the need to do. People always want to fix things. They want to make them better, which is sweet and well-intentioned, but not everything can be fixed. Sometimes a person just wants to find an outlet for their feelings.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple