Then She Was Gone

When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it's like I go back into the dream.

A man who can’t love but desperately needs to be loved is a dangerous thing indeed.

As the father of your children, as a friend, as someone who shared a journey with you and as someone who loves you and cares about you. I don’t need to be married to you to be all those things. Those things are deeper than marriage. Those things are for ever.

Stories,” she says, “are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.

May was like the Friday night of summer: all the good times lying ahead of you, bright and shiny and waiting to be lived.

If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along.

I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing.

Cooking doesn’t just nurture the recipient, it nurtures the chef.

The blame game could be exhausting sometimes. The blame game could make you lose your mind . . . all the infinitesimal outcomes, each path breaking up into a million other paths every time you heedlessly chose one, taking you on a journey that you’d never find your way back from.

I am brave, and I am brilliant, and I am strong..

Other mothers lose children without losing their husbands, too.” “You didn’t lose me, Laurel. I’m still yours. I’ll always be yours.” “Well, that’s not strictly true, is it?” He sighs again. “Where it counts,” he says. “As the father of your children, as a friend, as someone who shared a journey with you and as someone who loves you and cares about you. I don’t need to be married to you to be all those things. Those things are deeper than marriage. Those things are forever.

I will never guilt trip my children when they are adults, she’d vowed. I will never expect more than they are

People try and make out there’s a greater purpose, a secret meaning, that it all means something. And it doesn’t.

The blame game could make you lose your mind … all the infinitesimal outcomes, each path breaking up into a million other paths every time you heedlessly chose one, taking you on a journey that you’d never find your way back from.

Once you had a reputation for being nice you couldn't mess with it.

She’d never worked out how he’d done it, how he’d found that healthy pink part of himself among the wreckage of everything else. But she didn’t blame him. Not in the least. She wished she could do the same; she wished she could pack a couple of large suitcases and say good-bye to herself, wish herself a good life, thank herself for all the memories, look fondly upon herself for just one long, lingering moment and then shut the door quietly, chin up, morning sun playing hopefully on the crown of her head, a bright new future awaiting her. She would do it in a flash. She really would.

That was how she’d once viewed her perfect life: as a series of bad smells and unfulfilled duties, petty worries and late bills.

May was like the Friday night of summer:

Do you love him?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you love him enough to hurt a lot of people who don’t deserve to be hurt?’ ‘How do you expect me to answer that?’ ‘It’s a tough question, but you do need to answer it. Not now, but over the next hours and days.

I will see you next week, Mum. And if I don’t, then I want you to know that you have been the best and most amazing mother in the world and I have been extraordinarily lucky to have you for so long. And that I adore you. And that we all do. And that you could not have been any better than you were. OK?

All those hopes and dreams and talk of ballerinas and pop stars, concert pianists and boundary-breaking scientists. They all ended up in an office.

because I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing. So whatever you’re feeling now, it’s temporary.

Her daughter is dead and her mother is dead and her husband lives with a woman who is nicer than her in a hundred different ways. But she is OK.

And she felt it then, like a needle in her heart, the love her mother always talked about. ‘You won’t understand how much I love you until you’re a mother yourself.

You know, how you get to forty and you suddenly stop giving a shit about all the stupid things you worried about your whole life.

And it occurs to her for the very first time that maybe Hanna isn’t intrinsically unhappy. That maybe she just doesn’t like her.

You knew I would, didn’t you?’ She smiles sadly. ‘Oh, I don’t know, I suppose it occurred to me. I would have said something. Soon. I was on the verge. It just didn’t seem like first-date kind of fodder.’ ‘No,’ he says softly. ‘I get that.’ She turns the mug round and round, not sure where to head next with this development.

Stories,' she says, 'are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.

I thought of what I'd allowed myself to become, for you. I never wanted that bloody child. I only wanted you.