The Dead Romantics

I just regretted being the kind of girl who fell for someone like him in the first place.

Because I liked his charm, and I definitely didn’t want to, and I hated disappointing people, and—

. No, Florence. Bad girl, I scolded myself. You do not want to climb him like a tree, because he’s your new editor and therefore very, incredibly, stupendously unclimbable.

Love was putting up with someone for fifty years so you’d have someone to bury you when you died. I would know; my family was in the business of death.

I was an eighty-year-old in a twenty-eight-year-old body.

That’s lovely, dear.”

And in my head, every story has a happy ending

Every person has a secret. Every secret has a story.

I’d always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing.

But I was wrong.

Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn’t the absence of everything you lost—it was the culmination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.

Every person has a secret. Every secret has a story.