Stephanie

“Our thoughts create our emotions. So if you fixate on your worst-case scenario, you’ll make things harder for yourself.”
― Katherine Center, Hello Stranger

“Every parent’s an unreliable narrator. We think we know our kids better than anyone. But none of us can see them objectively.”
― Jason Rekulak, The Last One at the Wedding

“I forced myself to stay quiet. It's a tactic I learned from my wife, she used to say that if you wanted a kid to share things, you couldn't interrupt them with lots of questions. You had to shut up and let them talk.”
― Jason Rekulak, The Last One at the Wedding

“What if he hates me?"

"No one could possibly hate you, Xander," I told him, my heart twisting.

"Avery, people have hated me my whole life." There was something in his tone that made me think that very few people understood what it was like to be Xander Hawthorne.

"Not anyone who knows you," I said fiercely.

Xander smiled, and something about it made me want to cry. "Do you think it's okay," he said, sounding younger than I'd ever heard him, "that I loved playing those Saturday morning games? Loved growing up here? Loved the great and terrible Tobias Hawthorne?”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Final Gambit