Book Thoughts

All those moments throughout the days, weeks, months that don’t get marked on calendars with hand-drawn stars or little stickers. Those are the moments that make a life. Not grand gestures, but mundane details that, over time, accumulate until you have a home, instead of a house.

She couldn’t fathom what it must be like to be so loved and to be so sure of that love that you would fight tooth and nail to protect it, but she was incredibly glad that these girls had that.

“It’s not always enough to go looking for the place we belong,” Jamie said, his eyes on the house ahead. “Sometimes we need to make that place.”

“For the one you love? Anything. You unmake the world and build a new one. You do anything to give them what they need.”

She hadn’t understood how exhausting and heartbreaking it had been to hide such a big part of herself all these years, to reshape and contort herself into something more acceptable. She hadn’t realised just how heavy her mask had been until she’d discovered what it was to live without it.

And if it was just a little heartbreaking to be reminded of what she’d never had and likely never would, well, she could live with that.

I can be here, in the moment, instead of watching for smoke, ready to run.

This moment, though fleeting, belongs to me too.

all you need to do is fall in love once, though, to be ruined by it forever.