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"Stop it," I said "It hasn’t been that long"

"By the tiht hours, at least And a lot of awful things can happen in forty-eight hours"

"We don’t have to ile one of them You sound like Horace with all these worst-case scenarios There’s no use tor ourselves until we know for sure what’s happened"

"Yes, there is," she insisted "There’s a perfectly good reason to torment ourselves If we’ve considered all the worst possibilities and one turns out to be true, on’t be completely unprepared for it"

"I don’t think I could ever prepare s"

She put her head in her hands and let out a shaky sigh It was all too much to think about

I wanted to tell her then that I loved her I thought thatere sure about rather than everything eren’t--but we hadn’t said the words to each otherers

TheEmma, the shakier and sicker it made me feel, precisely because our future was so uncertain I needed to iine a future for myself with Emma in it, but it was impossible to picture our lives even a day fro no idea what tomorrow held I’m cautious by nature, a planner--someone who likes to knohat’s around the next corner and the corner after that--and this entire experience, frorine’s house to now, had been one long free-fall into the void To survive it I’d had to become a new person, sorandfather would’ve been proud of But rafted onto the old one, and I still hadI’d never heard of any da very badly for the world to stop spinning so I could just hang on to so ache, which Jacob loved E, or the old one, who just needed so on to?

I decided that I didn’t want to think about it right now--a distinctly old-Jacob way of handling things--and focused instead on the distraction nearest at hand: the hollow, and ould happen when it woke I would have to give him up, it seemed

"I wish I could take him with us," I said "He would uess he has to stay behind to keep the "

"So it’s a hiet too attached Re half a chance, it would eat you alive"

"I know, I know," I said, sighing

"AndI’hts kno to handle hollows After all, they used to be hollows"

"It’s a unique gift you have," said Reynaldo, speaking to us for the first ti the holloound to ruh Bentham’s cabinets for food, and now he and Mother Dust were seated at a s a block of blue-veined cheese