Mercy

Allie had trouble convincing herself that the reason they had gotten married years later did not have to do with the fact that after college, they were two of the few who had come back to Wheelock. Cam had returned because it was expected of him, Allie because there was nowhere else she really wanted to be.”

When she had packed all the artifacts that made up their personal history into liquor store boxes, the house became strictly a feminine place. She stood with her hands on her hips, stoically accepting the absence of old Boston Celtics coasters and the tangle of fishing poles, the old dartboard from a Scots pub, the toolbox and downhill skis, the silky patterned ties which sat in the base of one box like a writhing mass of snakes. Without these things, one tended to notice the bright eyelet curtains, the vase filled with yawning crocuses, a needlepoint pillow."

When he gave it to her that day, she’d held it up to the light, turning it back and forth, until his hands had come over hers, stilling. ‘Be careful,’ he had said. ‘It’s fragile. See the soft lead? It bends. It can break.’ She wondered why she had not perceived that conversation then the same way she did now: as a shrill and distant warning.”

In the moments before, she laid a hand on his arm. 'No matter what,' she said, giving him a look, 'you cannot stop.

He certainly wasn’t about to let a murderer off the hook because the man was his cousin. And bending the laws would be unethical. If there was any principle Cameron MacDonald lived by, it was doing things the way they were supposed to be done. After all, as both police chief and clan chief, it had been the pattern of his entire life.”

You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.