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I know you need him, lad. So, make him need you more.

She’d never had a grandmother. She’d never had a mother. She was afraid of hurting them all somehow because she didn’t know enough about people, about family. And, of course, hurt them is exactly what she did.

Although he could not hold her or hug her or kiss her on the forehead in the way of fathers, when he stood in a bookshop and thought of her and bought her a book and left it on her desk without a word, she knew that what he left there was his love.

You can’t do your best when you’re doubting yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself, who will? Just doing as well as you did last time is not good enough. I think of it as the “try to get what you can” mentality. It doesn’t require you to stretch, to grow. I don’t believe in that.

Do you know what makes you weak? You’ve never had to be strong. You’ve never had to try. You’ve never had to fight. And you’ve certainly never had to fight for your life.

Never presume to know your enemy. I have a closetful of kings.

“Love doesn’t keep up from freezing to death, Kell,” she continued, “or starving, or being knifed for the coins in our pocket.” Love doesn’t buy us anything, so be glad for what you have and who you have because you may want for things but you need for nothing.”

Lila had been around cutthroats long enough to know that the ones you truly had to fear were the ones who gripped their guns loosely.

Living with sadness, accepting it, is easier than trying to pretend it isn’t there. It is another of life’s great mysteries that sadness and joy can coexist so compatibly with one another.

Unmet expectations have a clever way of showing up at every stage of life.

If he could not feel her breath, he could at least be where she most recently breathed.

He looked into my eyes in a way that rearranged my soul. I had forgotten how good it felt to be seen by him.

The hurt in my gut clamped down unbearably. I told myself I could only cry for one minute; that was all Mama made way for. One minute of sorrow and back to a straight face, a stiff back, and work. But that one minute of sadness melted into ten minutes, and before I knew it, I had cooled off the water with my steady stream of grief.

My lips trembled, and tears clouded my eyes. I pulled Essex to my chest and squeezed my love into him. I tried memorising everything: the curve of his back, the way his stubble felt when he brushed it across my cheek, the hardness of his muscles, his calloused hands.

“Member now, even in the big house you’s still Pheby Delores Brown, born on Christmas Day. You the gran-daudder of Vinnie Brown, who was the gran-daudder of a Mandara queen. You a slave in name, but never in your mind, chile.”