Tabitha Freeman

“If I am dead, well, then there's somethin' 'bout you, Eleanor, that's makin' me feel like I'm still alive.”

“[T]he world needs us to be as flawed as we are. Everyone here needs to know that to get better. To know that they don’t need to be fixed.”

“I’ll always be broken,” I went on. “Because when I came here, no one fixed me. It’s not that they didn’t care to fix me. These crazy, wonderful people I met at Craneville didn’t fix me because they didn’t think I needed to be fixed. And it wasn’t because they were ‘crazy’…it was because they were the only people who knew that I could only face the world out there again as someone different. As someone who wasn’t perfect, who wasn’t normal, who didn’t have all the answers…someone who was somehow ‘fixed’ by being broken.”

“I’m so scared,” I whispered, as more tears began to roll down my cheeks. I looked up at them. “That big world out there…I barely remember it.”

“If I have the strength to sit here for months,” he murmured, almost painfully. “Falling more and more hopelessly in love with you every single day, while you’re still madly in love with a ghost, then you can have that same kind of strength to move on from this.”

“He’s nice, easy on the eyes. Plus, he’s British, which means he’s got manners and knows how to dance like Mr. Darcy, right?”

“Tha’ girl I saw every night in tha’ dream,” he whispered. “Tha’ girl was you.”

“Destiny isn’t meant to allow us to be lazy.”

“That’s what real love looks like—when your companion believes in you when no one else does. True love can really be that little red balloon that lifts you up through life’s storm.”

“I kissed him again and through all the new chaos enveloping my life, there was one solid truth that I would always hold to. I would be alone for centuries over centuries, past lives through future lives, until my soul met Andrew’s again. This love was special, this love was rare, and it did not get any better than this.”

“This is when I forgave my parents. This big secret that was not ready to reveal itself was the reason my parents had sent us here. This colossal secret was the reason my parents had been absent from their children, had never talked too much, but clearly had plenty to give. This is when I forgave my parents. On the remainder of our silent journey to the island, my soul was anything but mute. This is when I mourned the death of Murdoch and Elizabeth Benedict for the first time.”

“It was 12:08 a.m. I had just six minutes to get to the top of the lighthouse. I took off running up the rocks, trying to go as fast as I could while maintaining some sort of balance. When I got up to the lighthouse door, a loud explosion echoed through the sky behind me and I spun around. I shielded my eyes with my hand from the cold rain, which was now coming down harder than ever, as I looked at the interruption into the otherwise quiet Scottish night. Giant flames rose up into the air on the beach below the manor and two long lines of fire burst horizontally across the sky. The world was on fire.”

“You’re living in the past…in memories that are in but a single moment. You’re walking backwards in shoes that don’t fit.”