At the end of a criminal’s life, it’s always the small mistake, the coincidence, the lark. The time we got too comfortable, the time we slipped up, the time someone aimed a little to the left. I’ve heard Grandad’s war stories a thousand times. How they finally got Mo. How Mandy almost got away. How Charlie fell. Birth to grave, we know it’ll be us one day. Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.

Jones looks like he wants to slug me, which is only subtly different from his usual way of looking at me like I'm a slug.

Life's full of opportunities to make crappy decisions that feel good. And after the first one, the rest get a whole lot easier.

If they were real, then maybe the world was big enough to have magic in it. And if there was magic — even bad magic, and Zach knew it was more likely that there was bad magic than any good kind — then maybe not everyone had to have a story like his father's, a story like the kind all the adults he knew told, one about giving up and growing bitter.

Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts.

If you keep it," Daneca says, "he'll have his claws in you." Everyone has their claws in me. Everyone.

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be