Blake Crouch

“The first handkerchief was tied to a second, yellow handkerchief. He fed both through the window and kept pulling. Attached to it was a red one. Then a green one. “Go away, you goddamn clown!” Jenny ordered. But Benny the Clown continued to pull out handkerchief after handkerchief. Five…ten…fifteen…then… That’s not a handkerchief.”

“But I'll tell you what I do wish. Wish we could live twice, take a different path each time. That at the end of all this, when I finished serving God in the West, I could go back to that day on the beach, put a ring on Eleanor's finger instead.”

“You never experienced the gift of children, and I hate that for you, because you won't understand how I can still love you,how, even though you took everything from me, you're still all that I have.”

“When you were a child, I didn't tell you about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait.”

“I cannot separate the man you are now from the boy you were then, and it's killing me. I wanted everything for you, son.I still do.”

“When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man, drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time I see your face on the news or in the paper- "That man was once someone's little boy.”

“It had been over fives years since they'd last been together. They talked and held one another and cried, all knowing in the back of their minds that they could sit on this bed for twenty years, for fifty, but it wouldn't matter. There would be no real catching up, no recovery of lost time, no understanding of the damage the separation had caused. They were different people now--haunted, ridden with scars and nightmares. There was no going back to that stormy July night in Ajo, Arizona. That Innis family was gone, and they would have to find themselves and one another again, start over, and pray that somehow the pieces fit back together.”

“You know, you remind me of my younger brother. I miss that kid, so much that I sometimes regret killing him.”

“Like people would ever want to read books on an electronic screen.”