QUOTE : Who were you? When you were alive?” Emily said, her voice thick with wonder. “Tell me everything.” “Oh, I wasn’t anybody. Just a girl. I lived in a house like girls do. I loved a man once, loved him so much I couldn’t tell the difference between him and me. But he wasn’t the kind of man anyone should love. He took my heart and he took it and pinched it to death. If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. So I married someone else and had a child, like girls do. But my heart stayed pinched. Every time I tell the story, people swoon and say it’s dreadfully romantic, but it was horrible and I died halfway through my own story! I don’t know what’s wrong with the living! They think the blackest, most poisonous things are romantic. At least he’s dead now, too. He tries to talk to me but I stick my fingers in my ears until he goes away.