Talia Hibbert

Parce que cet océan d’amour dans lequel elle avait redouté de se noyer… eh bien, chacun des mots de Will était une vague douce et tiède qui la ramenait vers la surface. Et soudain, elle flottait.

At the time, it was romance novels that reminded me. Since you’ve never read one, that probably sounds weird. But it’s all about emotion, Dan—the whole thing, the whole story, the whole point. Just book after book about people facing their issues head on, and handling it, and never, ever failing—at least, not for good. I felt like my world had already ended unhappily, but every book I read about someone who’d been through the worst and found happiness anyway seemed to say the opposite. Like my story didn’t need to be over if I didn’t want it to. Like, if I could just be strong enough to reclaim my emotions, and to work through them, maybe I’d be okay again. That’s kind of what inspired me to, er, keep going. To make good choices, even when feeling better seemed impossible.

Abbie avait du mal à faire confiance, elle était d’un naturel anxieux et ses névroses avaient été multipliées par dix lorsque ses pires cauchemars s’étaient réalisés.

'[…] What matters is that, for years, I had no idea what was really happening to my body. No painkillers, no plysical therapy, no medical support whatsoever. So I did what I had to do. I developed my own coping mechanisms. The problem is, they weren’t particularly healthy.'
He wondered what it was like, to cope constantly. Tiring, probably. Stressful, definitely. Doing it alone didn’t sound healthy at all.
'I avoided anything that might make me feel worse,' she said. 'I was afraid.' No inflection. No emotion. As if she was reading someone else’s story from a sheet of paper. 'I quit netball. I quit my postgrad degree. I stopped going out with my friends. I didn’t stay up late because sleep was too precious. I refused to make plans because I never knew when my body might force me to change them. My friends disappeared one by one. I suppose my problems made them feel guilty.'

The thing about mental health was, you couldn’t take a course of antibiotics and be magically healed. Some people’s brains just thought too much or felt too much or hurt too much, and you had to stay on top of that.

« Qu’il soit prêt ou non, le moment était arrivé. Et il allait le saisir. Pour la première fois, il allait se lancer.

Parce que pour ce Noël, il ne voulait rien d’autre qu’Abigaïl Farrell. »

'Excuse me, universe,' she whispered to the kitchen floor. 'When you almost murdered me today—which was rather brutal, by the way, but I can respect that—were you trying to tell me something?'
The universe, very enigmatically, did not respond.
[…]
Oh dear. Her moment of communication with the universe rudely interrupted, Chloe hauled herself into a sitting position. Strangely, she was now feeling much better. Perhaps because she had recognized and accepted the universe’s message.
It was time, clearly, to get a life.

'I’m the kind of person who hurts. Too much.'
'No,' Gigi corrected calmly. 'You are a woman who, in a life filled with pain, came here to ask about love.'
[…]
She was the woman who’d come here to ask about love.
She was the woman who’d decided to change her entire life with nothing but a list.
She was the woman who survived, every single day.
She was Chloe fucking Brown, and she was starting to wonder if she’d been brave from the beginning. If she’d just needed to love herself enough to realize it.

She also knew now, really knew, why romance meant so much to him—not just the books, but that search for his own happily ever after. She’d thought he was just sweet, loving, maybe a little old-fashioned, but now she realized he was... inspired. That he was one of those people, one of many, whose lives had been forever changed by someone else’s words. And that wasn’t something Dani treated lightly. She made her living out of words. She knew very well that they could be everything.

En fait, la seule chose qui lui déplaisait dans Noël, c’était le niveau inhumain d’agitation. Le bruit constant, les lumières qui ne s’éteignaient jamais, les couleurs partout.