You should have spoken up sooner.” her grandmother answered. “No need to bear pain unless you have to.

Dicey felt a great weight settle on her shoulders. She tried to shrug it off, but it wouldn’t move.

He held the whip that and made those marks, and drawn that blood, and he was ashamed. He held the whip that could make more marks on the flesh of Nikol’s back. While Nikol begged.

All she knew was that his smile lit up the morning as the rising sun does. For a moment, looking at his face, it was as if her ribs were empty, hollow, as if the world had stopped forever while she looked into his eyes as blue as the bellflowers that grew wild across the meadows. For a moment, just until her beating heart had returned to her chest, Birle had thought she understood everything about herself she had never understood before.

Why doesn’t momma come back?

To himself, he called it a safe place, and when they were finally settled in at the end of July, living in the three-room house where windows gave out over the water and woods and sky, he knew he had been right.

He knew from the first that this man would know how to hurt him.

The worst things weren’t outside of you.

I do have trouble starting books. I have ideas that I have trouble starting to write. But I’m the kind of person who tends to finish everything she starts out of sheer stubbornness.

Evil would be done, that was the nature of the world; that was bearable if good could also be done.