It was one thing for a grandparent to withhold something […] from a grandchild, quite another for a father to… — Ransom Riggs

I didn't know how to respond. How do you say I'm sorry your father didn't love you enough(YEAH RIGHT) to your own dad? I couldn't, so instead, I just said goodnight and headed upstairs to bed.

I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of those came as a terrible shock and, like anything else that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After."