Page 77 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Elsewhere
Marion spied on Dana without pity. She glutted herself on Dana’s life, the way she drank tea and scuffed her boots through fallen leaves and let her temple rest against the scratched windows of the train. Real tea, real windows. Dana slept and ate and pissed and bumped up against other people, and even when it looked miserable it also lookedreal.It stropped Marion’s anger to a diamond point.
Seeing everything she’d lost almost broke her. Itdidbreak her, and when she pulled herself back together she understood everything with an aftermath clarity.
Dana had the whole world. A city full of strangers and colored lights and her hand on a pit bull’s satiny skull, kneeling on the sidewalk to pat it with its owner standing impatiently by. The rattle of the elevated train shaking rain into her hair. Hash browns eaten hot with ketchup dregs,showers.
She had every single thing but this: the foresight to be ready. The ability to see Marion coming, before it was too late.
