The Great Alone: A Novel

They sat there, not talking; each breath Leni took felt difficult, as if her lungs had a mind of their own and might stop working.

. In literature, death was many things—a message, catharsis, retribution. There were deaths that came from a beating heart that stopped and deaths of another kind, a choice made, like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. Death made you cry, filled you with sadness, but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should.

In real life, she saw, it wasn’t like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.

A thing can be true and not the truth, now shush.