6
" Today is going to be the real thing.
I have a hard time breathing. My heart races, I can feel my palms start to sweat. And I think so many things at once, my head begins to hurt and I hear someone groan and it confuses me until I realize it is myself.
Her smile, her sweet, sweet smile. The way she looks at me, as if I’m ten feet tall, as if I can hold the world in the palm of my hand.
And then, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “No, no, no. Please, Aidan, stop. No …”
The cops will come for me. Sooner or later. Two of them, three of them, an entire SWAT team, converging upon my doorstep. That’s why guys like me exist. Because every community has gotta have a villain, and no amount of pretend normal is ever gonna change that.
Gotta think. Gotta plan. Gotta get the fuck out of here.
To where? For how long? I don’t have that kind of cash….
I try to get my breathing under control. Find some sort of comfort. Tell myself it’s gonna be all right. I’m keeping with the program. "
― Lisa Gardner , The Neighbor (Detective D.D. Warren, #3)
8
" And it occurred to me, over a bowl of soggy cereal, that I could live like this. Compartmentalized. There, but separate. Together, but alone. Loving, but isolated. This is how I had been living most of my life, after all. In a household where my mother might appear in the middle of the night to do unspeakable things with a hairbrush. Then hours later, we’d sit across from one another sharing a platter of buttermilk biscuits for breakfast. My mother had prepared me well for this life. I glanced over at my husband, crunching away on Cheerios. I wondered who had prepared him. "
― Lisa Gardner , The Neighbor (Detective D.D. Warren, #3)
