I refuse to let the past find me here.

She hadn’t meant to get trapped in a conversation. That was the trouble with offering help to old people.

I'm sorry,' he says simply. 'People make mistakes, Gemma. We take the wrong action for the right reasons, and the right action for the wrong reasons.

Your mother and I do not approve of drinking. Have you not heard of the Eighteenth Amendment?” “Prohibition? I drink to its health whenever I can.

For once, Evie didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t really thought of her uncle as very human. He was more like a textbook who occasionally remembered to put on a tie. But it was clear that he was, indeed, human, with a deep wound named Rotke.

Sometimes we seek that which we are not yet ready to find.

Forget your pain. It was what I said when I took Father's hand in the drawing room yesterday, what I repeated again tonight. But I didn't mean this. I must be careful. Yet what bothers me isn't the power of the magic or how, to a person, they've all accepted it as truth. No, what unsettles me the most is how much I want to believe it too.