Best From The Embers Quotes by Aly Martinez

"You’re supposed to be able to support your family!"

"At what point is trying not good enough anymore?"

"We hadn’t been planning on kids yet. Jessica and I had a lot of living to do before we wanted to start a family."

"Was Luna, with all her thick, brown hair and a set of honey-colored eyes that were so uniquely hers it was as if she defined the color, the most spectacular thing that had ever happened to me? Unquestionably."

"You promised me, Eason. You swore to me the day we saw those two little pink lines on the pregnancy test."

"How?" she croaked, her lack of faith as insulting as it was justified."

"There was nothing I wouldn’t sacrifice—hopes and dreams included—to be the man Jessica and Luna deserved."

"You left him in there. You have to go get him. He never would have done that to you."

"I didn’t do this," I gasped, glancing over my shoulder at the towering inferno, the weight of gravity suddenly more than I could carry. "I barely got you out. I thought you were Jessica. I was going to go back for—"

"Then you go." Her chest shook with broken exhales. "You did this. You did all of this. Now you go in there and get my husband and you fucking fix it."

"You and the kids. You’re going to be fine. Let’s be honest, you were always the four-hundred-horsepower engine behind this family. I was just the hood ornament."

"Please just come back," I choked out around the inescapable sadness that had defined my every waking hour since the fire.

"It's like this domino effect, ya know? I don’t have my wallet. Which means I don’t have my debit card. But I gotta have an ID to get money from the bank. Not that cash really does you any good these days. Without a credit card, I can’t get a new phone, which is what I need for the insurance company to call me back. Meanwhile, I have no car, no way to get a car, and somehow during all of this, I have to figure out how to bury my wife."

"Hurting? Having my arms torn off would be hurting compared to the shit that is happening inside me right now."

"In the wake of tragedy, it’s easy to withdraw into yourself. After all, you can’t fathom how anyone else could adequately understand the misery you’re going through."

"Through it all, Evelyn stood in the corner, bouncing my fussy daughter, who would never remember her mother."

"I can’t eat or sleep. I just fucking shake all the time, like my soul is trying to tear free from my body. And sometimes I wish it would, even if that meant I went with it."

"What’s going on in here? I spun like a kid caught with my hand in the cookie jar."

"Dinner will be ready at six. Be there so I know you haven’t gone off the deep end and drunk yourself into a coma, leaving me with three children under six and another funeral to plan."

"You won’t be alone, Bree. You get overwhelmed or feel like you can’t take any more, just say the word and I’ll drive the getaway car."

"I needed to grab on to anything I could and rein it in. Even if at that moment all the help I needed was something as simple as asking Eason or Jillian to watch the kids for a few minutes so I could actually get work done. I just couldn’t do it."

"You’re not having a mental breakdown, Bree. You lost your husband and your best friend a month ago. Give yourself a little grace. You’re allowed to have bad days. You’re allowed to be overwhelmed. You don’t have to keep it together twenty-four-seven just because you have kids."

"It’s heaven. I guess your dad can wear whatever he wants."

"And what if I could take care of three out of four of those things for you?"

"As nice as it sounds, I think I’m going to take a pass on more handouts. I’m all maxed out."

"Things at Prism are worse than I thought. Nobody knows what the hell is going on. We have no product. No reliable manufacturer."

"Actually, it’s exactly what I need to be dealing with right now. Because if I don’t, Prism is done."

"The reason why everyone I loved—Rob, Jessica, Asher, Madison, and Luna—all adored Eason Maxwell."

"Life is short and its impact isn’t measured in years."

"Be the star. Flip the entire music industry on its head. But most of all, show Luna that if you work hard and never give up, dreams can become a reality."

"You’re ready." "Hurry up, Bree. Before I’m gone."

"Let the erotic dust settle and then see how you feel in a few days."

"But none of it matters until your heart gets the memo too. Until then, all you can do is sit back and enjoy the ride."

"Don’t underestimate the people who loved you."

"Yeah, well. I’m taking a personal day to help a friend."

"Not if you’re only working out so you can eat the bacon."

"You did good this weekend. Really fucking good."

"The one I have now is sexy as all hell, standing in front of me, dead tired in old Birkenstocks."

"I can’t stop thinking about how deep you got last night."

"Your lips. Your neck. Your cock. I can’t wait much longer to taste them all again."

"That is my daughter. That little girl is my entire fucking reason for living, and you’re telling me she might not even be mine?"

"I was a fucking puppet in his show, and I’m done wearing the strings."

"No, I wasn’t. You know it as well as I do. I was a puppet in his show, and I’m done wearing the strings."

"Luna is yours in the only way that truly matters, okay?"

"Because he doesn’t matter anymore and you still do."

"Emotions were high, the shards of our broken hearts crunching on the floor beneath our feet, but just as it had always been, even while we’d been shattered and gasping for breath, it was just Eason and me, surviving in the only way we knew how: together."

"Maybe it was just a moment of weakness, the desperate desire to replace his anguish with pleasure."

"That awkwardness. The uncomfortable silence. Insecurities. That wasn’t us. Us was something I knew how to do."

"This picture, Bree. It’s not what we have to lose. It’s what I’ve already gained."

"With you, I’m happy too. The rest will fall into place, okay?"

"You could take me anywhere in the world right now and I’d go just as long as you were there too."

"We were making it ours, and despite how scary it was to let go and have faith again, with Eason and our small family happy, I was happy too."

"You might want to put on a pair of jeans, Bree. It’s not nearly as much fun for me to take them off at the end of the night if you aren’t wearing any to begin with."

"I thought Bree was going to crawl under the bar each time they passed us. I laughed harder at that dinner, shielding her eyes every three minutes, than I had in years."

"Like two thirty-something parents who hadn’t been out of the house for anything other than work in roughly a million years, we were total lightweights."

"He sang horribly. Seriously, he was like a-long-tailed-cat-in-a-room-of-rocking-chairs bad."

"I had never in my life been leveled with a glare harder or faster. And never in my life had I enjoyed it more."

""You’re the best kind of fun. Because you’re my kind of fun.""

""I don’t know what glucose did to you in a past life, but you should talk to your doctor about it.""

"For as ugly and tainted as the world could be, the sight of Eason losing himself in an orgasm would forever be one of the purest and most beautiful things I could experience."

""So the girls and I had a talk last night." He flipped the page in his notebook to reveal a crayon rendering of three sad kids—both of the girls crying. Everything was dark, the sky gray and the grass brown."

""It’s you and me, Eason. Let’s rip off the Band-Aid, go in there, play with our kids, give them the absolute best life possible, and never look back.""

""This is it. After this, they have no more control over us. We read these results and then it’s just me and you and those kids making a life together from here on out.""

""Being in love with Eason Maxwell was the easiest thing I’d ever done.""

"I loved my kids. I loved watching them grow. I loved being the one to teach them their 123s and ABCs."

"It was the hardest job I’d ever had and that included building a multimillion-dollar company from the ground up."

"But so did the sweet snuggles when they got tired and the giggles when I pushed them high on the swings at the playground."

"Yes, but I’ve had concerns over his taste buds for years."

"Running to the store had meant missing hide-and-seek with the kids, and quite honestly, I was sick of missing the good stuff."

"Trials and tribulations. Hitting rock bottom and still getting back up."

"You have lost your damn mind if you think I’m going to Los Angeles for the biggest day of my career without you."

"When it rains, it definitely pours, and I was all too happy to drown in Eason Maxwell."

"I worked my ass off to build that company. Maybe it’s time I turned over the reins to someone else and followed my own dreams."

"I don’t need money, Eason. I need you. That’s all I’ll ever need."

"They say when it rains, it pours. For going on two years, that had been exactly the case for us. Drama and tragedy, one after another."

"The house hadn’t been the same without him. Too boring. Too quiet. Too healthy."

"But there was magic in watching the kids clap when the chef made an onion volcano."

"I’d let her sleep for a while. Middle-of-the-night sex definitely had its merits."

"By most people’s standards, probably. But not for me. I’d found her. The one. There were no nerves or fears. No second-guessing or cold feet. I knew down to the marrow of my bones that Bree had been born to be mine."

"Life was never easy, and ours had been harder than most. However ugly it might have been at times, there was beauty to be found when looking back at all the pain and heartache and devastation, knowing we’d come out the other end better off and more in love than I had ever known possible."

"So, as I fell asleep in bed with her that night, a smile on my face, love in my chest, contentment coursing through my veins, I had no idea our greatest trials were yet to come."

"In the middle of tragedy, it’s strange the things that become engrained into your memories."

"Time passed, seconds felt like hours. Much like the stages of grief, the emotional process of finding out someone had kidnapped your child while she’d slept soundly under your roof just yards away from your bedroom door started with denial."

"But desperation didn’t allow for logical problem solving."

"Even if we could come up with the money, Agent Garrett and his team were strictly against paying the ransom. They said there was no guarantee the abductors would give her back and sometimes it just made them greedy and violent, demanding even more."

"I would have rather been back at the fire. I would have rather been back inside the fire. I would have rather been on fire than not knowing if we would ever see our little girl again."

"We just had to wait and pray they found her."

"But hope was my drug of choice at the moment."

"That kind of regret was not something I ever wanted my boy to experience."

"She was old enough to realize her best friend was gone, but she was oblivious to the fear and panic that was circling like a vortex around us all."

"I had no idea how I would survive the night without her."

"But with my daughter on my hip and Bree at my side as we headed home to our family, I knew I’d saved exactly the right one."

"Because once and for all, Rob Winters didn’t matter anymore."

"Rob had always seemed so supportive of Eason’s music, but looking back, I was starting to think that their friendship had only existed because Rob had always expected Eason to fail."

"Honestly, Rob’s inferiority complex made up the bulk of his issues."

"Eason and I still had a lot of questions. Most of which started with why."

"Every night, the five of us piled into that bed. There was little sleep to be found, but we were together and safe."

"After everything we’d been through, my family needed me more than ever. And truth be told, I needed them a hundred times more."

"The man of my dreams smiled down at me. 'Mmm, I could go for another shower with you.'"

"I’d thought my life was over the day of the fire, but little had I known, it was only the start of forever."