Survival is the thing. The mind will twist to survive. Anything can become normal.
Yvonne started humming the QuickGo jingle, one of those torturous tunes that enters through the ear canal and proceeds to ricochet around the skull in search of an escape route it will never find.
When Myron was ten years old, his father had taken him and his younger brother, Brad, to a game. Brad was five at the time. Dad had secured.
Maya had one of those sudden “pow” moments sneak up on her, the ones all parents experience, when you are simply overwhelmed by your love for your child, when you are awestruck and you can feel something rising inside of you and you just want to hold onto it and yet, at the same time, that caring, that fear of losing this person, scares you into near paralysis. How, you wonder, will you ever relax again, knowing how unsafe the world is? Lily.
Sitting for an hour without reading material meant he had to think.
You want to put people in neat categories, make them monsters or angels, but it almost never works that way. You work in the gray and frankly that kinda sucks. The extremes are so much easier.
This is how detecting works. You keep going even if what you’re doing seems like a momentous waste of time and energy.
Win’s phone rang. He picked it up and said, “Articulate. Okay, put it through.” Two seconds later he handed the phone to Myron. “For me?” Myron asked. Win gave him flat eyes. “No,” he said. “I’m handing you the phone because it’s too heavy for me.” Everyone’s a wiseass.
I kept glancing at her animated face, scrunched up as though imitating an adult. I got hit with that overwhelming feeling. It sneaked up on me. Parents get it from time to time. You are looking at your child and it is an ordinary moment, not like they are onstage or hitting a winning shop, just sitting there, and you look at them and you know that they are your whole life and that moves you and scares you and makes you want to stop time.
As a soldier, you don’t stand at attention because it looks nice. You stand at attention because, on some level, it either gives you strength or, just as important, makes you appear stronger to both your comrades and enemies.
You could trust nature but not man.
The house had the stale smell of a grandparent. When you’re a kid, the smell gives you the creeps; when you’re an adult, you want to bottle it and let it out with a cup of cocoa on a bad day.
But if Frank had wanted Pavel dead, he would have had Aaron do it. Pavel had been murdered between midnight and one. Aaron was dead by midnight. Myron mulled this over a bit and decided that Aaron’s being dead made it extremely unlikely he was the killer.
Don’t show me paradise and then burn it down.
Check out the comments underneath,” Augie says. I move the cursor down. “There are over fifty thousand of them.” “Just click ‘Top Comments’ and read a few.” I do as he asks. And as always when reading a comments section, my faith in humanity plummets:.
Thomas had gotten his learner’s permit a week ago – the parental equivalent of a stress test without using an actual EKG machine.
We pay attention to what works with our narrative. We tend to dismiss that which does not.
Purging was part of his grieving process –.
The old saw about bad news traveling fast has never been truer than in the age of the Internet.
Secrets... were cancers. Secrets festered. Secrets ate away at your innards, leaving behind nothing but a flimsy husk.