didn’t tell you sooner,” she says, like she’s trying to shove the words through a too-narrow doorway. All the way over here, I wondered if laying into her would give me some sense of control.

For the first time in my life, I know what the hell Cathy was talking about when she said I am Heathcliff. Not just because Charlie and I are so similar, but because he’s right: we belong. In a way I don’t understand, he’s mine, and I’m his. It doesn’t matter what the last page says. That’s the truth. Here, now.

“If I had to pick one person to be in my corner, it’d be you. Every time. You take care of shit.”

I am afraid, always, of the kind of pain I know we won’t survive a second time.

Libby was wrong when she told Sally I am just like Mom. Mom worked nonstop to chase something she wanted. For me, it’s running endlessly trying to escape the past. Fear of the money running out again. Of hunger. Of failure. Of wanting anything badly enough that it will destroy me when I can’t have it. Of loving someone I can’t hold on to, of watchi

“Nora.” He just barely smiles. “You’re in books. Of course you don’t have a life. None of us do. There’s always something too good to read.”

Life with Mom, life in New York, was like being in a giant bookstore: all these trillions of paths and possibilities drawing dreamers into the city’s beating heart, saying, I make no promises but I offer many doors.

This is why crushes are terrible. You go from feeling like life is a flat path one needs only to cruise over to spending every second on an incline, or caught in a weightless, stomach-in-your-throat drop.

I open Dusty’s pages and picture myself in a submarine, sinking into them, urging the world around me to dull. It’s never taken effort—that’s what made me fall in love with reading: the instant floating sensation, the dissolution of real-world problems, every worry suddenly safely on the other side of some metaphysical surface. Today is different.