There is never any turning back Gemma. You have to go forward. Make the future yours.

I'm an oddity of one, my strangeness too complicated to explain or share.

Why does anyone do anything? Belief. A belief that they are right and just in their actions. Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, because he believed that God had commanded it. To kill your son is unthinkable. A crime. But if you are acting in the belief that your God, your supreme deity whom you must obey, has demanded it of you, is it still a crime?

It was a kiss small in its ministrations but epic in its feeling.

When you looked up to the sky and cried 'Why?' sometimes the sky shrugged, yet other times it answered with warm assurance of linked hands.

Evie wanted to cry. From fear. From exhaustion, yes. But mostly from the cruel uselessness, the damned stupid arbitrariness of it all.

In them, she saw the sham of her life laid out like a book, the foolish belief that she, that anyone, could escape the consequences of this world, could flee from death. That was the deceit. The true serpent in the garden.