Blurb:
Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most.
Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up— she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.
Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.
As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan — her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.
Rating: 5/5 stars
Side Notes:
- Genres: Contemporary Romance, New Adult Fiction
- Highly recommend for 16 years and above
- TW: explicit language, sexually graphic scenes, Alcohol abuse, Attempted rape, Depression, Domestic abuse (graphic), Violence, Suicide (brief discussion)
Book Quotes:
- “There is no such thing as bad people. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things.”
- “It stops here. With me and you. It ends with us.”
- “All humans make mistakes. What determines a person’s character aren’t the mistakes we make. It’s how we take those mistakes and turn them into lessons rather than excuses.”
- “He pulls back to look down at me and when he sees my tears, he brings his hands up to my cheeks. “In the future… if by some miracle you ever find yourself in the position to fall in love again… fall in love with me.” He presses his lips against my forehead. “You’re still my favourite person, Lily. Always will be.”
- “Just because someone hurts you doesn’t mean you can simply stop loving them. It’s not a person’s actions that hurt the most. It’s the love. If there was no love attached to the action, the pain would be a little easier to bear.”
- “You can stop swimming now, Lily. We finally reached the shore.”
- “Just because we didn’t end up on the same wave, doesn’t mean we aren’t still a part of the same ocean.”
- “Fifteen seconds. That’s all it takes to completely change everything about a person. Fifteen.”
- “Naked truths aren’t always pretty.”
- “I feel like everyone fakes who they really are, when deep down we’re all equal amounts of screwed up. Some of us are just better at hiding it than others.”
- “And as hard as this choice is, we break the pattern before the pattern breaks us.”
- “Imagine all the people you meet in your life. There are so many. They come in like waves, trickling in and out with the tide. Some waves are much bigger and make more of an impact than others. Sometimes the waves bring with them things from deep in the bottom of the sea and they leave those things tossed onto the shore. Imprints against the grains of sand that prove the waves had once been there, long after the tide recedes. That was what Atlas was telling me when he said “I love you.” He was letting me know that I was the biggest wave he’d ever come across. And I brought so much with me that my impressions would always be there, even when the tide rolled out.”
- “Life is a funny thing. We only get so many years to live it, so we have to do everything we can to make sure those years are as full as they can be. We shouldn’t waste time on things that might happen someday, or maybe even never.”
- “Cycles exist because they are excruciating to break. It takes an astronomical amount of pain and courage to disrupt a familiar pattern. Sometimes it seems easier to just keep running in the same familiar circles, rather than facing the fear of jumping and possibly not landing on your feet. My mother went through it. I went through it. I’ll be damned if I allow my daughter to go through it. I kiss her on the forehead and make her a promise. “It stops here. With me and you. It ends with us.”
- “I’ll keep pretending to swim, when really all I’m doing is floating. Barely keeping my head above water.”
- “Maybe love isn’t something that comes full circle. It just ebbs and flows, in and out, just like the people in our lives”
- “No one is exclusively bad, nor is anyone exclusively good. Some are just forced to work harder at suppressing the bad.”
- “I think that’s one of the biggest signs a person has matured—knowing how to appreciate things that matter to others, even if they don’t matter very much to you.”
- “Preventing your heart from forgiving someone you love is actually a hell of a lot harder than simply forgiving them.”
- “Lily, Atlas says just keep swimming. —Ellen DeGeneres”
- “I hope you defy the odds of most dreams and actually accomplish yours.”
- “I love it when the night sky makes me feel insignificant”.”
- “We all have a limit. What we’re willing to put up with before we break. When I married your father, I knew exactly what my limit was. But slowly . . . with every incident . . . my limit was pushed a little more. And a little more. The first time your father hit me, he was immediately sorry. He swore it would never happen again. The second time he hit me, he was even more sorry. The third time it happened, it was more than a hit. It was a beating. And every single time, I took him back. But the fourth time, it was only a slap. And when that happened, I felt relieved. I remember thinking, ‘At least he didn’t beat me this time. This wasn’t so bad.” “Every incident chips away at your limit. Every time you choose to stay, it makes the next time that much harder to leave. Eventually, you lose sight of your limit altogether, because you start to think, ‘I’ve lasted five years now. What’s five more?”
- “You are my wife. I’m supposed to be the one who protects you from the monsters. I’m not supposed to be one.”
- “You’re only human. And as humans, we can’t expect to shoulder all of our pain. Sometimes we have to share it with the people who love us so we don’t come crashing down from the weight of it all”
- “Sometimes even grown women need their mother’s comfort so we can just take a break from having to be strong all the time.”
- “Our eyes, locked together, speak more naked truths than our mouths ever have.”
- “Shouldn’t there be more distaste in our mouths for the abusers than for those who continue to love the abusers?”
- “I’m sorry about that. I’m sure you didn’t miss me like I missed you, but sometimes the things that matter to you most are also the things that hurt you the most. And in order to get over that hurt, you have to sever all the extensions that keep you tethered to that pain. You were an extension of my pain, so I guess that’s what I was doing. I was just trying to save myself a little bit of agony.”
- “It’s easy when we’re on the outside to believe that we would walk away without a second thought if a person mistreated us. It’s easy to say we couldn’t continue to love someone who mistreats us when we aren’t the ones feeling the love of that person. When you experience it firsthand, it isn’t so easy to hate the person who mistreats you when most of the time they’re your godsend. Ryle”
- “But sometimes you can’t control where your mind goes. You just have to train it not to go there anymore.”
- “As his daughter, I loved him. But as a human, I hated him.”
- “That’s what fifteen minutes can do to a person. It can destroy them. It can save them.”
- “It’s not a person’s actions that hurt the most. It’s the love. If there was no love attached to the action, the pain would be a little easier to bear.”
- “People spend so much time wondering why the women don’t leave. Where are all the people who wonder why the men are even abusive? Isn’t that where the only blame should be placed?”
- “I’m sure there’s more substance in the love between two adults than there is between two teenagers. There’s probably more maturity, more respect, more responsibility. But no matter how different the substance of a love might be at different ages in a person’s life, I know that love still has to weight the same.”
- “Yes. I kept the magnet Atlas gave me when we were kids. Yes. I kept the journals. No, I didn’t tell you about my tattoo. Yes, I probably should have. And yes, I still love him. And I’ll love him until I die, because he was a huge part of my life. And yes, I’m sure that hurts you. But none of that gave you the right to do what you did to me. Even if you would have walked into my bedroom and caught us in bed together, you still would not have the right to lay a hand on me, you goddamn son of a bitch!”
- “My favorite conversations are the ones with no real answers.”
- “I love him. I still do and I always will. He was a huge wave that left a lot of imprints on my life, and I’ll feel the weight of that love until I die. I’ve accepted that.”
- “I am a brave and bold businesswoman with zero fucks to give for men in scrubs.”
- “You warned me. You said one time with you wouldn’t be enough. You said you were like a drug. But you failed to tell me you were the most addictive kind.”
- “When life gets you down do you wanna know what you’ve gotta do? . . . Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.”
- “And people like my father are the problem. Instead of helping others, people use the worst-case scenarios to excuse their own selfishness and greed.”
- “Do you have any idea how many doors I’ve knocked on to find you?”
- “My heart is pounding like it wants out. I wish I could give it a way out. I’d set the mother-fucker free right now if I could.”
- “I smile, loving how his words feel against my skin. Inside my heart.”
- “I feel like everyone fakes who they are, when deep down we’re all equal amounts of screwed up. Some of us are just better at hiding it than others”