Quotes from Gregg Olsen

It's funny how the most traumatic events that happen to you are always there behind a sometimes-impenetrable memory.

I saw her as she showed herself to the world: fun, smart, sexy. Funny how those things are often a smoke screen from one's true self. It's easy to act all those things. Up for adventure. Head nods at complex scenarios when she's not really listening. Ready for bedroom play even when there is no bedroom. In the beginning, Sophie was all those things. I didn't know they were a construct. I thought they were key parts of who she was.

I should have gotten a dog.

Kindness can be a weakness, Grace. Please listen to me. Don't get me wrong. I don't want you to be harsh, uncaring. Not at all. I don't want you to be indifferent to the needs of others. I just don't want you to put anyone else above yourself.

I wonder how he'd feel if I cut off his nut sack and flung it against the cupboard door.

Three sisters. Now grown women. All live in the Pacific Northwest. The eldest, Nikki, lives in the moneyed suburbs of Seattle, in a

It's easy to forget that inside her cool and placid exterior is a human being. Not nice to think, I

Shelly's alchemy with other people's money and Social Security numbers went on for a very long time. Some years later, when Sami tried to get an apartment, her application was rejected because she had bad credit. There was a debt of $36,000 associated with her Social Security number. It wasn't her name on the account, however

Sami told her about the abuse that had been going on. All that she'd missed. How Tori was locked in a dog kennel and sprayed with a hose. The nudity. The withholding of food. And Ron Woodworth. "She did the same thing to Kathy, Nikki.

do with the fact that she and Sarah's father weren't

She knows that what happened to her has altered her life in ways that are invisible, but though she chooses to think the best of people, she can't do that when it comes to her parents.

Shelly never felt bad about anything. At least not when it came to other people's feelings. The girls noticed she'd shed a torrent of tears for dead pets, but never for another person.

He labels as evil those parents who present a normal social persona to shield the harm they do in private. They serve their own needs and desires at the expense of their relatives, especially their children.

And though he could woo and bed any woman he wanted, and had done so with the regularity of a tomcat, he underestimated the tenacity of a woman scorned.

No one could possess a shred of doubt that Olalla's most famous institution was the sanitarium up on the heights off Orchard Avenue.

somewhat sad mill city north of Seattle that seemed always on a futile hunt for a lasting jolt of optimism.

She loved her sisters more than anything, though she also wondered why her mother saw her so differently, treated her with such hatred.

cell finally finds service outside of Fruitland and I pull the BMW over to make some calls. First

The truth is surviving childhood trauma isn't the same thing as living.

Nobody gets paid what they think they're worth.

I look at the bottle. I feel so diminished just then that I don't even have the confidence to reach over and pour myself another, let alone smack my sister over the head with it.

was a magnificent structure for its time and place—a sanitarium of three stories, plus a basement. Dormer windows jutted over a porch that ran the full length; a dark, oak staircase in the grand foyer dominated the interior. There was even a kitchen, an office, and of course, the Treatment Room.

He was so curious about the boys' Thanksgiving that he couldn't put into practice a skill Griffin-Hall had been trying to teach him: to stop and take a few deep breaths and reconsider what he was about to say.

When somebody pushes, pushes, and pushes you into a corner, pretty soon you're not going to want to be in that corner anymore.