The Stranger's Wife Quotes
"The rush of love she feels watching her sleeping daughter soon dissipates into something else though; a terrible gnawing guilt that pulls at her lower intestines, tugging at her guts."
"Her instincts are aggressively chopping through her positive thoughts like a machete."
"She had never planned for any of this to happen; she had never wanted it to be this way."
"She owes it to him to tell the truth. Everyone deserves the truth, don’t they?"
"But now she realised it wasn’t as black and white as that, and that sometimes good people found themselves in less than good situations."
"We both deserve to be happy – everyone does, don’t they?"
"Ironically part of her feels hurt and angry by his reaction, but it only serves as affirmation that she’s doing the right thing."
"I want us to be as amicable as possible for Lily’s sake," she says. "I want us to try and work things out as fairly and kindly as we can, Evan."
"I’ve only ever wanted you to be happy, to make you happy."
"Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, Danny Boy."
"Children want their parents to be happy as much as their parents want them to be."
"It’s incredible how people make excuses for the ones they love."
"I want you to know that she gets on well with Nick. She’s been good as gold… I’ve explained to her as best I can that me and her daddy still care about each other but that we’re not going to live together anymore, and that we both love her."
"You’re the only person who can help me. You know how much I love you."
"We had a son, Saul, remember? The baby boy you killed inside me. Our child, Saul; your own flesh and blood."
"You murdered your own son, Saul and you don’t care…"
"It’s going to be OK, Cath. We’ll get through this, like we always do."
"Eventually she had learned to expect the abuse, to manage it, because it had become part of her life."
"You’ve got to fight, Catherine – fight for your life, for your kids, for yourself."
"Life is precious, Catherine. It’s a gift from God and it’s your gift, no one else’s – don’t give up your gift for him, for anyone, especially those you know don’t deserve it."
"Justice didn’t exist for normal people like her or Cath or Nicky. Sometimes you had to find your own justice."
"We are all just guessing in the dark really, so how come it works out well for some and not for others?"
"But now I think about it, I wish I’d said ‘the ability to change time, to stop it in its tracks, to be able to reverse it…’"
"You’ve got to tell the police. Tell them the truth, get this Miranda to back up your story about the bruise..."
"As soon as you said you were leaving him. I’d hoped I was wrong, because he seemed to be taking it OK, but men like Evan… they don’t go down without a fight."
"You never knew him at all, darling – that’s the trouble."
"When you’re going through hell, you know what they say... Keep going."
"It’s a man’s duty to take care of them, keep them safe, provide for them..."
"The whole point is both people enjoy the experience."
"Even if you were a novice and accidentally shot someone, surely you’d have the nous to grab two very expensive items of jewellery and make a quick escape?"
"They say men with prominent ones are well endowed, though how this correlates I have no idea."
"Someone always slips up somewhere down the line, even in the cleverest of crimes."
"Fear was a governess most people did not understand, not really."
"No money in the world could buy back her mother, or Nicky, her daughter or Cath’s sons."
"I promise," I say, with my fingers crossed behind my back.
"I didn’t want to expose anyone; I just need names… I’d rather not have to obtain a warrant…"
"But then again, do we ever really know anyone?"
"Years of control, telling me I was mad, an unfit mother, a whore, a useless good-for-nothing mad whore."
"Enjoy those years... years when they're young and dependent on you and still believe in Santa... because you never know what they might grow into, what they'll become..."
"If life gave you musical prompts... Imagine how many lives would be saved, how many bad decisions would be diverted."
"You understand why I left him, don't you, Beth? Tell me you understand."
"I loved you more than I've ever loved anyone in my entire life."
"This is just your little way of getting back a bit of power over me, isn’t it?"
"No one ever leaves the late, great Evan Lawler, do they? Not without paying a severely high price."
"It wasn’t euphoria exactly; it’s closer to relief."
"She’d ended up drifting off… then awoken with a start and had immediately panicked, checking the time. It was just after 1 a.m. Gathering herself, Cath had taken her handbag and, careful not to make any noise, she had quietly left the bedsit, taking one final look behind her before gently closing the door."
"The tears are real enough; she’s not had to fake them. But they aren’t for him."
"Desperate people do desperate things. Sometimes we have to do what we have to do just to survive."
"Nothing matters anymore now that he is dead. She has nothing left to fear."
"I’m not interested in the shoplifting, Cath. I’d probably have done the same myself."
"You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours… You think those things haven’t been going on for years?"
"A jury will decide what’s right and wrong and what punishment is befitting of the crime; they’ll look at the facts, take everything into consideration…"
"I thought, naïvely, back then, that it didn’t matter if I didn’t really love him. I wasn’t even sure what love was, not then."
"When you see that child for the very first time, the need to protect them, it overrides everything, a base, primeval instinct that would see you dead before they came to any harm."
"We met purely by chance," she says eventually. "Although I'd prefer to call it fate."
"It was the strangest feeling... seeing her there, sitting on that train, it was as if I was looking into a mirror, like meeting myself."
"These things, they don't just happen by chance, do they?"
"I thought that maybe... after my mum died... she had something to do with it, had sent her to me as a lifeline..."
"She deserves that, Detective. I hope I never see her again."
"She's buried underneath the swimming pool," she says, "there, outside, beneath the concrete."
"She feels tiny in my arms; broken like a china doll, and I know that even with all the glue in the world to stick her back together, she will never again be the same."
"Why is it that children always suffer the most for the mistakes of their fathers and mothers?"
"There’s nothing exciting about arresting a young, damaged woman for the murder of her murdering husband and subsequently making their daughter an orphan – or as good as."
"The number you have dialled has not been recognised..."
"I could watch her for hours. Stare at her all day. Sometimes I still can't believe she's really mine."
"The lump in my throat is like broken glass and I cannot see through the blurred tears."
"Six years for manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility."
"You don’t meet your doppelganger for no reason."