A Talent for Murder

Then he discovered the subset of girls who’d been ignored their whole lives, the wallflowers, and he found that they were far more interesting to him. He could talk them into the only kind of sex he enjoyed, sex that hurt, and he found that sometimes he could even talk them into hurting other people with him.

Wives were gatekeepers, really, telling the world that the man they had married had been thoroughly vetted and passed some sort of test.

What the books taught him was that there was a whole world out there, an adult world, of sex and death and betrayal and lies.

our memories are never reliable, that what we are actually remembering is not the event itself, but a replay of the last time we remembered the event

isn’t falling in love with someone else a risk for everyone in a marriage

“teachers are the worst at conferences, like poorly behaved children. They do things they’d never let their own students do.

Someone is dead.
Even the trees know it.
—Anne Sexton, “Lament”