C.J. Flood

“You can't tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy.He wasn't even sixteen but his coffin's the same size as a man's would be.It's not just that he was young, but because it was so sudden. No one should die the way he did; that's what the faces here say.I think about him, in there, with all that space, and I want to stop them. I want to open the box and climb in with him. To wrap him up in a duvet. I can't bear the thought of him being cold.And all the time the same question flails around my head, like a hawkmoth round a light-bulb: Is it possible to keep loving somebody when they kill someone you love?”

“Sam was your brother, and Trick was your friend, but what they did had nothing to do with you. You don't have to choose. Just because me and your dad couldn't live together, didn't mean you had to stop loving one of us, did it? Doesn't work like that. Love doesn't work like that.”

“Soon I will be older than him, but I'll always chase him anyway, like a little sister, and always he'll be running just along at the edges of things, and always he'll be turning a corner, just ahead.”

“There was nothing I wished I'd said to him. There was nothing I wished I hadn't said.”

“For some reasonthen, I remember how Sam hated to be laughed at, and all of the times I did it anyway, because I wanted him to feel stupid, and I wonder how anybody can be cruel to someone they love. How can anyone do anything but love each other and be kind when at the end of it all, waiting quietly, sure as the dark at the end of the loveliest day, is only this?”