When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

He says one word, nodding into the daylight. "Look." It's an astounding word. It's a gift.

None of the wives mention the security guards by the door, who will probably tackle us to the ground if we try to leave without our husbands.

It is the face of a girl who has seen the world, who realizes that it hates her, and who hates it in return.

It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.

I shake my head, watching snow tumble and swirl from an all-white sky. The world seems so clean if you only look up

I wonder if she has figured out that I'll never love Linden, especially not in the way she does, and that he'll never love anyone the way he loves her. I wonder if she realizes, despite all her efforts to train me, that I can never take her place.