The Family Remains Quotes
"There is a whole world contained inside this small bag of bones."
"I feel the door to the world open, and I step inside."
"I have exquisite taste, but I just don’t know how to put tasteful things together in any semblance of visual harmony."
"But I had no option other than to work and I’ve made a success of my life and I guess that’s a good thing, isn’t it?"
"Business-class travel. If you haven’t done it, then you can only imagine it."
"I was buzzing. And I remembered what you said about still finding your feet with your business."
"We may be very different, Lucy and I, but our connection runs deep, even after twenty-five years apart."
"Twenty-six years is long enough for memories to grow cobwebby, abstract."
"He was always a loner, my brother. Never a pack animal."
"She thinks of her first sighting of Henry last year, the strange, smiling man waiting for her in the empty shell of their childhood home with his hair made blond, his face made pretty."
"It felt surprising to Rachel both in its unexpectedness and its predictability."
"In spite of the ocean and the years that had kept them from having shared experiences to bind them together, they made a strange sort of sense."
"He had a few business associates and a couple of ex-girlfriends, but he didn’t have a rooted circle of friends."
"I remember it very well," Rachel flinched slightly at his words.
"She felt the smile freeze on her face and then snapped herself out of it."
"Rachel was not a jealous person. She had never felt like this before about any other man’s history."
"She imagined him worrying about what people would think of him, worrying about the impression he would make."
"She felt protective of him that night, watching him button his shirt, check his teeth, fuss with his hair."
"She would look at herself in a mirror occasionally, after one of these pathetic, desperate interludes, and wonder who she was."
"She thought to herself, 'How absolutely awful.'"
"He had met a handful of her friends already over meals for four with other couples, but he had not been required to socialize with Rachel’s friends on a large scale."
"She pulled her coat tight around her and nestled herself against Michael’s shoulder as they walked."
"Her feelings were muddled and strewn in random places, as though she’d been ransacked."
"I have been chasing a ghost all these years, living my life in the slipstream of a young man who doesn’t exist anymore."
"He was chatting to a woman called Ella whom Rachel knew vaguely from Dominique’s extended social circle."
"Rachel and Michael honeymooned in the Seychelles two months after Michael’s proposal."
"She thought about the man she’d seen on the internet, the man in the photo who looked as though he expected to be in control of everything."
"She felt as if Michael was now somehow in control of her happiness, could switch it on and off with a careless comment or a throwaway anecdote."
"She was halfway through her second glass of champagne and the delight of success was so pure and so golden."
"She thought of how she’d contorted herself and her habits and her behaviour for twenty years to be a person who would not be raped."
"The thought of Michael resentfully trudging out to the shops without a consensus on dinner was not one she could currently entertain."
"She wanted to be home when fate took her home."
"He was out of her. Off her. His hands gone from her throat."
"You are the single best and most remarkable thing in my life."
"And now we both know what you are and what you want."
"The last thing he’d googled was a company that offered motorbike tours of the Magnificent Mile and Lake Michigan."
"Everything is so expensive. And I’ve been looking at a place further out in the country. With a bit of land."
"He’s the head designer and franchise owner of the kitchen showroom in town where I used to work."
"But my friend, Dido – she’s going to help me get set up."
"I’ll give some to my mother. Of course. And maybe, you know, some charities. Investments."
"As a detective, I know this only too well. A change of name. A change of appearance."
"It’s the only thing that makes any sense though, isn’t it? Like you say. Teenage children, here one minute. Gone the next."
"The sight of her name in Libby’s text messages is enough to make her flesh crawl."
"I am leaving Libby Jones’s home with more questions than I arrived with."
"Her heart skips a beat and then races. There is a barrage of messages from Libby on WhatsApp."
"It was both surprised and relieved. Each day she awoke in her apartment in Camden Town."
"She would focus on the business. On her friendships. She would go to yoga every week."
"I experience a warm feeling of euphoria and sat at my desk smiling for a while."
"I am alone at my desk behind a closed door when it arrives, I cannot help but shout out."
"I have seen very loving turkeys on the internet."
"The days were growing warmer, longer, kinder."
"Rachel Gold, you are a beautiful little genius. You really, really are."
"On the same day that Libby Jones had the princely sum of £7.45 million paid into her account."
"This is where Justin Redding’s herb garden used to be."
"You’re British? What brings you to Chicago? Just trying to find an old friend."
"I am feeling propulsive. I am among their number today. But my eyes are not dead."
"But I have cause to believe that you have a guest? Currently? A Mr Miller Roe?"
"I picture it filled with Libby Jones’s beseeching eyes, Miller Roe’s stern shake of the head."
"I leave more silence, hoping that Libby Jones will come to her senses."
"Ah. Mr Roe. At last. It is a joy to hear your voice."
"I have some theories that pertain to your newspaper article."
"I realise as I put the phone down that now Miss Jones and Mr Roe have more than half the day to decide on new ways to lie to me."
"But she went back to London and got on with her life."
"She started work on a silver bangle for Dom’s baby’s first birthday."
"She had a dramatic haircut and regretted it."
"She gave him crisps to put into bowls and asked him to put out some wine glasses."
"It’s disgusting that he’s spending all that money on another woman."
"I get bits of gossip from Dom from time to time."
"Oh, I have no idea. He works for me on Tuesdays and Thursdays."
"I tried to find out more about it, but he didn’t seem to want to expand on it."
"She talked him through the menu, and he made all the right noises."
"She was haunted by the thought of the things that Michael might have done to Lucy."
"She was haunted by the idea that she couldn’t do anything for Lucy."
"Rachel was haunted for days after her visit to Nice."
"She watched her father as the evening unfolded."
"It’s time for me to face the fact that I’ll be old soon."
"‘I have not spoken to your father for a couple of years,’ he said."
"Rachel wanted to push back into the previous conversation."
"She tried to imagine what Libby and Miller are being forced to reveal."
"It’s pointless now, Miller,' she says to him. ‘They know where she is. It’s pointless.’"
"I feel a shiver pass through me at this idea."
"I slowly pull my phone from my jacket pocket, and I turn it on."
"She ordered a minute steak and frites and a carafe of white wine."
"She watched Lucy drag him across the cool white granite tiles."
"We were traumatised. We were broken. We were damaged. I have no other explanation for you."
"Decisions I made when I was sixteen years old feel so distant as to be almost alien."
"I think maybe I must let it go. Maybe. But first I will finish this beer."
"I can feel a restlessness, a need for something, but this time it is not a need for oblivion, it is quite the opposite."
"I have no reason to pretend not to be him anymore. No reason whatsoever."
"It's going to kill me if I keep fussing at it."
"But it's gone before I can grab hold of it to analyse and then she smiles again."
"I have been haunted now, for so long, by what I was witness to."
"It is all a lie. Of course it is a lie. But I must not let the detective know."
"I see what is in his eyes: the truth. He knows that Justin’s suicide note is a fiction."