Chapter 11

• Her eyes welled up with tears, but she fought them back, not wanting to make the situation any more dramatic than it already was. She knew it wasn’t fair to him, but she couldn’t lie to him either. That was the most important promise she had made to herself after her divorce from Ronin, that she would be honest with herself and others about her feelings.
• “I’m scared that it’s happening too fast.” She said to him, having to force the words because of all those timid voices in her head. “I’m scared that you literally came out of nowhere and I don’t know how to handle this. You. Sometimes I feel like everything is wrong, that the person I’m trying to be isn’t actually me. But then I think about it a bit more and remind myself that in the past, I had lived every moment of my life for the happiness of others. Because the prospect of offending someone had been so terrifying to me since childhood, I let people treat me any way they saw fit. I let them walk all over me. Time and again. Again and again. I gave them the power to hurt me, to take me for granted, and to treat me with contempt. But that’s not what I wanted for myself. I don’t think anyone deliberately does.” Regardless of how hard she tried, tears streamed down her face, one after the other, a steady dribble of tiny diamond-like droplets.
• “Sometimes I worry if I’m making the same mistake again, that I’m once again letting others control my life. I’m letting them manipulate me as they wish because I cannot muster up the courage to say no. That it has become a subconscious part of my personality to put myself last—”