You've been captive for so long that you don't even realize you want freedom anymore.

In another time, in another place, I wonder who they might have been.

I think she's brave. I think that nobody has ever believed what she could be capable of. All her life, nobody was listening.

We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.

She has the majesty of hurricanes and explosions.

It's best to let her go," he says. No, no, that's wrong. It's never right to give up on someone.

And everywhere girls, tumbling from trees like orange blossoms and hitting the earth with sickening thuds. They crack open.