“She wasn’t going to lie and she wasn’t going to try to hide Terrible or who he was. She loved him and he was hers, and that made her so proud her chest hurt, and if anybody didn’t like it they could go fuck themselves.”

“He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t tell her how much she had come to mean to him. She could destroy him with her rejection. If she had feigned her feelings for him – if he’d bought into her lies and her quest for freedom…. He wasn’t sure what he would do. He could hurt her." Caleb.”

“Elle had gone off in another direction and made him swear to ‘whatever twisted deity he believed in’ that he wasn’t going to follow her. Really made him wonder where the hell she was going.”

“He seemed so terribly weak. She would have had more respect for him if he'd told her to go fuck herself.' I have to go to sleep' she'd scathe.Then she'd roll over, and so would he. They'd be lying there like two strangers who just happened to be sharing the same bed. It was in those moments she began to plot her escape.”

“He wasn’t looking at her, was at such an oblique angle to her that his face was little more than a sliver, but she knew him at once. “It was like reading,” she would try to explain later, and she wasn’t talking about phonics. She didn’t break him into syllables—shoulders, hair, shirt collar, hand, nose, cheekbone—and put him back together again; she didn’t sound him out. He was a language she knew, and it was whole-word recognition: Will.”

“Yes, Lex was her friend. Yes, she wanted to help him out. But Terrible … he wasn’t her friend, he was her life.”