Quotes from Alison Gaylin

a couple with a missing child, like any couple anywhere with any missing child. They have nothing.

There are moments in my life—just a few of them—when the present and the future seem to bleed into each other and I see everything from the strangest perspective, understanding before I even know what's happening that from here on in, nothing will be the same.

That photograph I saw of him and his friends posed around the deer carcass, rifles resting against their sides like drunken prom dates, beer cans raised high … According to the caption, it was taken just this past August.

She deserves that feeling, that lightness, the ability to move, to live again. We deserve it. I raise my glass to karma—which,

It seemed to me like the ultimate wrong lesson for a girl her age to be learning. (If she wanted to watch reality TV, I reasoned, why not something like Survivor or The Amazing Race or even American Idol, where winning was based on real skills?) I suppose deep down,

Those comic book conventions where they dress up as characters and fully commit to the roles, the online games where they waste entire days in a cartoon landscape, spending play money and living out alternate identities, even falling in love . . . You have to have one foot in childhood to commit to pretending that intensely, and they do. These kids do. Anyway,

I don't know. … Vanity? Insecurity? Kardashianism?

They need to be punished to feel guilt, and then they're never punished, so they never do.

I read the cheery caption, about how award-recipient Harris Blanchard "took a gap year, but is certainly making up for it!" So that's what they are calling it now—the time before and after he stood trial for the rape of my daughter. A gap year.

When you apologize that much, there's something you aren't saying.

She sighs heavily. "Not surprising. It'd be everywhere if they were rich white girls." Goes back to her keyboard. "Anyway … I hope they catch his sorry ass." "Yeah. Me

if I didn't ask questions, the truth would still be the truth.

Harris Blanchard was a terrible human being. But he was also a kid like Emily was, with a mother and a father. And his death hasn't changed my life for the better. It hasn't made Emily any more alive.

Grounded her for two months. Her dad thought it excessive. We smoked pot when we were that age, Matt said, missing the point. Yes, we smoked pot when we were fourteen, but Emily wasn't us. She was better than us.

0001 knew what would happen. If everything went the way she planned it to go and if each part of this giant machine she's assembled performed her role effectively, she knew very well where the knife would wind up, but how did she know Harris Blanchard would be there?

I've lost twenty-eight pounds since Emily's death. I've stopped coloring my hair and wearing makeup and I had the bolt-ons removed, and so I am literally no longer the woman I once was. There is no reason to watch me. No flattering reason, anyway.

I'd never watched The Bachelor myself and was basing everything on preconceptions. But somehow the idea of all these intelligent young women competing pageant-style for the love of some blandly handsome pharmaceutical sales rep who kept talking about his "journey.

As though, after five years, a light's been switched on, and how Camille Gardener feels is the only thing that matters

my dream, as taught to me by my own mother, was to be the final destination of a man's journey.

work hard. I don't miss deadlines or pull diva fits when someone wants a change to the design, even an ill-advised one. From time to time, I catch up with old friends over lunch. I make jokes, even.

At the time, she'd been pregnant with her first child, a girl, which made her sympathize with me instead of the rich golden-haired boy with the angelic blue eyes and the premed major. I couldn't imagine anything worse, she had told me in the squad car, than losing a daughter like that.

your family gives enough money to a school, that school will defend you to the death, no matter what the facts are behind that death. They're like cults you pay to be the leader of. And Brayburn, as I learned from Xenia, of all people, has been serving its devotees an especially potent strain of Kool-Aid.

Come with me and let's start all over. I said no, and he got angry. Blamed Luke. The way you sneak out to see him, to be near him. You're attached to him, and it's sick, Camille. You're sick.

And it isn't doing a thing to them. You get that, don't you? They're going on with their night, drinking champagne, toasting their award-winner. They don't think they've done anything wrong, and they never will. They see themselves as the victims. They see him as the victim.