7 Quotes by V.S. Kemanis

The reality and what it meant was slowly dawning: the betrayal, deception, and omission. Clandestine meetings. Evasion under questioning. In hindsight, Dana and Evan picked out the clues they’d missed, reevaluated the moments they’d been led astray, and tiptoed over possible theories as to how they’d been duped.

Rage and despair shook her for minutes or hours. She was unaware of the passage of time. Finally spent, she retreated inward and collapsed onto the floor in a fetal position, the letter in shreds around her. The room had grown dark. Like a gentle snowfall, the cold mantle of an unbearable silence descended.

Distance and time and a whitewashed mind hadn’t kept a child from growing, from existing, from demanding a place on this earth.

Her immediate impulse was one of self-preservation. She was tied up in this somehow, she didn’t know why or how, but there was something waiting for her on the other side of this crowd.

She’d discovered the beginnings of her adult person, her preference for lucidity, prudence, responsibility, and restraint. Tranquility could be eked from boredom, results from hard work.

No one is on this road, she thought. No one but us. Everyone knows this isn’t the place to be at three o’clock on a summer afternoon. Everyone but us.

This congregation of displaced persons had been brought together at a moment in time, in this room, by a few irrevocable mistakes of the past—those acts of rage, greed, lust, and revenge that ran like silent films in their heads, the actors driven by emotions that had gone cold and were now inexplicable.