A sense of peace comes over her. She realizes, for the first time in her life, that deciding to be strong doesn’t mean you get to decide what you’ll endure and when.
So far the process has unfolded without a hitch, in meetings much like this one, while Cole stares out the sea-facing glass wall, wondering what’s become of his ambitions and his father’s legacy, a legacy that includes inventing a drug that revolutionized the treatment of HIV throughout the world.
Copper Pot, which stinks because I hear they have good pie.
When we get back, maybe we can all sit down and have a meal together, and you two can bury the hatchet or something. Or, you know, do what men do when they’ve been bumping chests so much their backs are starting to get sore. Like yoga.
Why is he the only one who can see this – that our faces are masks, rendering our personalities, our behaviors, our true accomplishments, utterly irrelevant, and yet we seem to have utter, idiotic faith in them as indicators of what’s in the soul?
But men like this one, men who will run you off the road because they have cast you in their paranoid fantasies, are far more common. And the tyranny of their appetites is so woven through every woman’s world that imagining life without it is the same as imagining life without ground underfoot.
She did not feel she could be a writer because she lacked the courage to let anyone read her words. When.
The bar looks like the dirt beside the irrigation canal burped up an old trailer it couldn’t swallow.
Yeah, now that you’re not sleeping with him anymore, it doesn’t seem like such a great idea, does it?
Rowe is the last name of a Canadian author who wrote a vampire novel her grandmother had loved.
There is never shame in surviving.
And you know instantly what it means. You know you’re being punished by God, by your parents, by everyone you have ever met, everyone who ever knew your secret. Because all you wanted was to feel less alone. All you wanted was to have them smile at who you actually were.
You can admit that what happened to you made you stronger without celebrating the people who did those things to you.
Both study her, their jaws working, as if the five words she just spoke have awakened a predatory energy inside them.
Snarky Snarkerson!
That’s the thing people don’t understand about rape. It’s the feeling of having hate, someone else’s hate, inside of you, and you try to gather every part of you into the space that’s left over, and the longer it goes on the space gets smaller and smaller.
Is there any training that can prepare you for this moment, being face-to-face with a human monster, a man who seems to glide placidly through the everyday world in a baseball cap, smelling of Old Spice while concealing a gallery of horrors beneath his garage, in the back of his truck, inside his mind?
Making a new decision, breaking an old habit. It takes strength. And believe me” – he kisses her gently on the forehead – “ you are stronger than you know.
It was kinda perfect. When we weren’t rocking each other’s world in the bedroom, we went off and did our own thing. We were married on the weekends, she liked to say. Any more than that and I would’ve gotten in the way of her reading.
Smartphones, devastating the world one instantly delivered tragedy at a time.
Death comes for the dead.