Alice Byrnes

“One day soon, you’ll hear a car pull up to your curb, an engine cut out. You’ll hear footsteps coming up your front walk. Like they did for Edward Wayne Edwards, twenty-nine years after he killed Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, in Sullivan, Wisconsin. Like they did for Kenneth Lee Hicks, thirty years after he killed Lori Billingsley, in Aloha, Oregon.

The doorbell rings.

No side gates are left open. You’re long past leaping over a fence. Take one of your hyper, gulping breaths. Clench your teeth. Inch timidly toward the insistent bell.

This is how it ends for you.

“You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark,” you threatened a victim once.

Open the door. Show us your face.

Walk into the light.”
― Michelle McNamara, I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

“Well, don't expect us to be too impressed. We just saw Finnick Odair in his underwear.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

“Maybe it wasn’t the smart thing, but when you lose someone like that? They’re just gone? There’s this hole inside you you’d give anything to fill. You don’t think, you don’t plan, you just pour shit into it, anything that will fill it.”
― L.L. McKinney, A Blade So Black

“Alice spent the rest of the evening up in her room pretending to read a book about a black girl and some dragons. Normally, she’d be all about that Khaleesi life, but a combination of worry for Hatta and just plain old boredom—she’d been trying to get into this same book for a week now—kept her from making it past the first chapter.”
― L.L. McKinney, A Blade So Black