The Lying Game

You’re never an ex-addict, you’re just an addict who hasn’t had a fix in a while.

A wall, after all, isn’t just about keeping others out. It can also be for trapping people inside.

Here, in this house the ghosts of our past are real

I close my eyes, listening to the sound of the past, imagining myself back into the skin of the girl I once was, a girl whose friends were still around her, whose mistakes were ahead of her......I am happy.

A lie. I'd almost forgotten how they feel on my tongue, slick and sickening.

That’s the trouble with having a “click” as Mary Wren might call it. When you define yourself by walls, who’s in, who’s out. The people on the other side of the wall become, not just them, but them. The outsiders. The opposition. The enemy.

And it’s a story about hope—about how we have to go on, after the unbearable has happened. Make the most of our lives, for the sake of the people who gave theirs.

Part of the Lying Game was always to know when the game was up, when to bail out.

And I am thinking about how, however much we struggled to be free, this is how it always ends, the four of us, skewered together by the past.

with a feeling like my whole life had been shaken like a snow globe and left to resettle.

The day-trippers who pass through on their way to the sandy beaches up the coast go wild for the nets, taking photographs of the pretty little stone and half-timbered houses swathed in the webbing, as their kids buy ice creams, and gaudy plastic buckets. Some of the nets look pristine, as if they were bought straight from the chandler and have never seen the sea, but others have plainly been used, with the rips that put them out of service still visible, chunks of weed and buoys knotted in the strands. I have never liked them, not from the first moment I saw them. They’re somehow sad and predatory at the same time, like giant cobwebs, slowly engulfing the little houses. It gives the whole place a melancholy air, like those sultry southern American towns, where the Spanish moss hangs thick from the trees, swaying in the wind.

Here’s to us,” she said, holding the bottle high, the moonlight striking off the glass. “May we never grow old.

close my eyes, listening to the sound of the past, imagining myself back into the skin of the girl I once was, a girl whose friends were still around her, whose mistakes were ahead of her. I am happy.

They are here: Luc, Ambrose, and not just them, but ourselves, the ghosts of our past, the slim laughing girls we used to be before that summer ended with a cataclysmic crash, leaving us all scarred in our own ways, trying to move on, lying not for fun but to survive.

Why didn’t I realize that a lie can outlast any truth,

Tight-knit friendships are all very well and good, but they can close us off from other chances. They can cost us a great deal, in the end.

All I saw were flaws- the spots on my chin, the hint of baby fat around the jaw, the way my unruly flyaway hair wisped out from the elastic band. "Look," he said. "The reason it's not coming together is because you're drawing the features, not the person. You're more than a collection of frown lines and doubts. The person I see when I look at you..." He stopped and I waited, feeling his eyes on me, trying not to squirm beneath the intensity of his gaze. "I see someone brave," he said at last. "I see someone who's trying very hard. I see someone who's nervous, but stronger than she knows. I see someone who's worried but doesn't need to be." "Draw that." " Draw the person I see.

You know full well, you’re never an ex-addict, you’re just an addict who hasn’t had a fix in a while,

what if I ended up split down the middle when the train divided, living two lives, each diverging from the other all the time, growing further and further apart from the me I should have become?

I take a breath and hold it for a long time, looking down at Freya’s slumbering face. And then I text back. Everything’s fine. Dad’s meeting us at Aviemore. I love you. It’s a lie; I know that now. But for her, for Freya, I can keep lying. And maybe one day I can make it true.

It even explained something that I had never understood- the way he would let the village boys tease and mock and swagger at him, and he would just take it and take it and take it..and then crack.

What am I coming to? I am as bad as Kate, haunted by the ghosts of the past.

You're never an ex-addict, you're just an addict who hasn't had a fix in a while.

I remember the mantra of visitors when she was a newborn—sleep when the baby sleeps! And I wanted to laugh. I wanted to say, Don’t you get it? I can’t ever sleep again, not completely. Not into that complete, solid unconsciousness I used to have before she came along... ...Anything could happen- she could choke in her sleep, the house could burn down, a fox could slink into the open bathroom window and maul her. And so I sleep with one ear cocked, ready to leap up, heart pounding, at the least sign that something is wrong.

But his grief, the gaping hole left after my mother died- it's too close to my own. Seeing his grief, year after year, it only magnifies my own. My Mother was the glue that held us all together. Now, with her missing, there are only people in pain, unable to heal each other.

an image flashes sharply into my mind, distracting as a jab from a stray pin when you’re dredging for your purse in your handbag.