“Fumbling in the dark, Josie reached underneath the frame of her bed for the plastic bag she’dstashed-her supply of sleeping pills. She was no better than any of the other stupid people in thisworld who thought if they pretended hard enough, they could make it so. She’d thought that deathcould be an answer, because she was too immature to realize it was the biggest question of all.Yesterday, she hadn’t known what patterns blood could make when it sprayed on a whitewashedwall. She hadn’t understood that life left a person’s lungs first, and their eyes last. She had picturedsuicide as a final statement, a fuck you to the people who hadn’t understood how hard it was for herto be the Josie they wanted her to be. She’d somehow thought that if she killed herself, she’d beable to watch everyone else’s reaction; that she’d get the last laugh. Until yesterday, she hadn’treally understood. Dead was dead. When you died, you did not get to come back and see what youwere missing. You didn’t get to apologize. You didn’t get a second chance.Death wasn’t something you could control. In fact, it would always have the upper hand.”

“You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.”

“She understood what it was like to stand right in front of people you loved, even though they could not see you.”

“But there was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secretthatsome mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else’s smile; that she wasstanding on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip andattracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real…and who, whenyou got right down to it, didn’t want to remember, because it hurt even more than this.”

“Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuousroom, sure-a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm to enter-but itwas also a room from which there really wasn’t an escape. Either Josie was someone she didn’twant to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted.”

“As Lacy waited for her turn to speak on Peter's behalf, she thought back to the first time she realized she could hate her own child.”

“CanI tell you something? Off the record?”Alex nodded.“Before I took this job, I used to work in Maine. And I had a case that wasn’t just a case, if youknow what I mean.”Alex did. She found herself listening in his voice for a note she hadn’t heard before-a low one thatresonated with anguish, like a tuning fork that never stopped its vibration. “There was a womanthere who meant everything to me, and she had a little boy who meant everything to her. And whenhe was hurt, in a way a kid never should be, I moved heaven and earth to work that case, because Ithought no one could possibly do a better job than I could. No one could possibly care more aboutthe outcome.” He looked directly at Alex. “I was so sure I could separate how I felt about what hadhappened from how I had to do my job.”Alex swallowed, dry as dust. “And did you?”“No. Because when you love someone, no matter what you tell yourself, it stops being a job.”“What does it become?”Patrick thought for a moment. “Revenge.”