I love you. Remember. And someday, I will find you again.
But if you do believe, then you already know all about magic.
Perfection is a promise, and a reassurance that we are not wrong.
But that’s the problem with love – it acts on you, works through you, resists your attempts to control.
The first one, we’ll name Blue.
The memories seem like snapshots from someone else’s life.
But it’s not about knowing. It is simply about going forward.
For a moment, my heart aches for him. I should never have asked him to join me here; I should never have asked him to cross.
Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all. I told on them. I was jealous.
Until, one day, she wasn’t.
I think of Grace and feel a sharp pain in my chest.
For a split second, he had looked almost like my Alex again.
This is the language of the world before – a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair – before the blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.
I’m not the Hana everyone told me I would be after my cure.
Over the past week, I’ve accepted that I will never love Julian as much as I loved Alex. But now that idea is overwhelming, like a wall between us. I will never love Julian like I love Alex.
It’s as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.
That’s what you do for family. Anything.
Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.
His secret name, which belongs to me, and to him, and to no one else.
People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.