Dying's a boring side effect.

She liked to imagine him stealing a glimpse of her over the backyard fence, proudly watching his strange daughter daydream under the beech tree. Blue was awfully fond of her father, considering she'd never met him.

Without turning on the light, I went to my bed and lay down, my arm thrown across the mattress, my hand aching because Grace wasn't underneath it

Mum liked to say that some things happen for a reason, that sometimes obstacles were there to stop you from doing something stupid.

He'd only been gone two seconds, but the room got brighter when they were together, as if they were two elements that became brilliant in proximity. At Sam's clumsy efforts to carry the vacuum, Grace smiled a new smile that I thought only he ever got, and he shot her a withering look full of the sort of subtext you could only get from a lot of conversations whispered after dark. It made me think of Isabel, back at her house. We didn't have what Sam and Grace had. We weren't even close to having it. I didn't think what we had could get to this, even if you gave it a thousand years.

The way Gansey saw it was this: if you had a special knack for finding things, it meant you owed the world to look.

She leaned toward me, offering her neck, and I kissed her just behind her ear.