Emily Henry

ON VACATION, YOU can be anyone you want.

Like a good book or an incredible outfit, being on vacation transports you into another version of yourself.

In your day-to-day life, maybe you can’t even bob your head to the radio without being embarrassed, but on the right twinkly-light-strung patio, with the right steel drum band, you’ll find yourself whirling and twirling with the best of them

“But that’s the point. Your job doesn’t have to be your identity. It can just be a place you go, that doesn’t define you or make you miserable. You deserve to be happy, Harriet.”

Like even when something beautiful breaks, the making of it still matters.

They belonged to you before I ever saw you. They belong to you in every universe we’re in, Harriet.”

The world is your oyster.”

“You don’t know the difference between pity and sympathy,” I said. “I’m not pitying you. It makes me sad to think of you being treated like that. It makes me mad to think you didn’t have the things all kids deserve. And yeah, it makes me mad and sad that a lot of people go through the things you went through, but it’s even more upsetting because it’s you. And I know you and I like you and I want you to have a good life. That’s not pity. That’s caring about someone.”

People were complicated. They weren’t math problems; they were collections of feelings and decisions and dumb luck. The world was complicated too, not a beautifully hazy French film, but a disastrous, horrible mess, speckled with brilliance and love and meaning.

Shadi insisted on cleaning the entire house. All I really wanted to do was lie on the couch, eating a pile of potato chips off my chest and watching reality TV, but it turned out she was right. Cleaning was a much better distraction.

Deep cleaning put me into a trance

“My mom believes in fate, in destiny—in the divine hand of God. But not so much that there’s no room to blame herself for what happened to my dad. She was the one who brought us there. And she was the one who took me out. She didn’t tell him, because she knew he was in too deep. He wouldn’t have just refused to leave—he would’ve atoned for us.”

“Atoned?” I said.

“Lingo,” Dave explained. “It’s a confession on someone else’s behalf. They didn’t want us to think of it as reporting, keeping tabs on your neighbors. It was ‘atoning.’ It was making the selfless sacrifice of putting a wedge in your own relationship with a person in order to save them from sin. Deep down she knew that if she told Dad she wanted out, we both would’ve been punished. She would’ve gotten at least two weeks in isolation. I would’ve been beaten, then stuck with another family until her ‘wavering faith had been restored.’ They said they didn’t like the violence. That it was their own sacrifice to discipline us out of love. But you could always tell the ones who did.