Only death couldn’t be swiped away by a credit card.
When Ronan was hit, it was the opposite; he became so urgently present that it was as if he’d been sleeping before.
Calla had once observed that Maura had no pets because her principles took too much time to take care of.
And everywhere, everywhere, there were books. Not the tidy stacks of an intellectual attempting to impress, but the slumping piles of a scholar obsessed. Some of the books weren’t in English. Some of the books were dictionaries for the languages that some of the other books were in. Some of the books were actually Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Editions.
Her heart tethered itself.
And Ronan did because Niall Lynch was a forest fire, a rising sea, a car crash, a closing curtain, a blistering symphony, a catalyst with planets inside him. And he has given all of that to his middle son.
But she didn’t want that. She wanted something more.
Although Pete didn’t know it, he was pointing at the very box truck that he had come all this way to earn, the box truck that was currently holding the Soria cousins, including the one he was going to fall in love with. As he squinted to see more, the rear door of the truck closed and the light went out. In the resulting blackness, Pete wasn’t sure he’d seen anything at all. “Lizardmen,” Tony said. “Probably.
I’ll pour gasoline on everything Dad built and we can just leave the Barns behind.
Gansey sighed, small and quiet and ragged, like he hadn’t meant to let it escape. She shifted her gaze from the window to the side of his head, watching him watch instead. He pressed his thumb against his lower lip-this was Gansey, that gesture- and then he swallowed. It was, she thought, just as she felt when she looked at the stars, when she walked in Cabeswater.
They’d also told him Adam would probably never hear out of his left ear again. This was the hardest thing to internalize, that something permanent but invisible had happened.
Gansey. That’s all there is. Once she’d seen his death laid out for him, and seen that he was real, and found out that she was meant to have a part in it, there had never been a chance she would just stand by and let it happen.
It was 6:21. No.
The mere mention of Ronan Lynch’s name had scraped something raw inside Whelk. Because it was never Ronan by himself, it was Ronan as part of the inseparable threesome: Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey, and Adam Parrish. All of the boys in his class were affluent, confident, arrogant, but the three of them, more than anyone else, reminded him of what he’d lost.
Adam felt the truth of it. This awful and impossible and lovely object was what a dream was when it had nothing to inhabit. Who was this person who could dream a dream into a concrete shape? No wonder Aglionby bored Ronan.
It was easy to know everything when time was circular, but it was hard to remember how to use it.
He asked it so quietly that the words came out gravelly, like a violin played too softly.
Two more tears had queued up, but when she blinked, they remained in her eyes. Shining little lakes.
Ronan looked pained; polite was not his style. But he said, “Salve.” To Blue, he said, “That actually means be well.” “Super.
He knew it was not allowed, by rules he himself had set. He would not permit himself to play favorites between Adam and Ronan.