"They would be fine, certainly, but they would never be the same. They each knew the building was rotten to the core, even those of them who did not know about me growing in the rot. They loved the Crown anyway: they had come of age here, found each other here. Their lives had played out over the linoleum and under the halogen, the back-and-forth with their customers, the reek of supermarket deli and the food court, the rotating seasonal decorations, day after day, year after year, the place getting more worn and them just living through it. Thriving against it, in some ways burning all the brighter for the decay. They would be fine, after. Better than fine."

"Shell's own voice inside her head had been so loud lately. We all need help. She imagined that whoever it was running a dank little flower shop in the Woodbine Crown probably needed a fair amount of help. Maybe not more than her, necessarily. But more than most."

"There was a thick in the air that you couldn't condition out, a gelatin feeling, suffocating. It made Shell fell like she was eight, fourteen and perhaps like she was seventy-two and still here, in a shopping centre adjacent to her housing estate, still here, still in this place. It wouldn't let her leave this part of the world and she had worked so hard to get gone. She almost had."

"I chose Shell, make no mistake, but there was a helpful organic chemistry waiting there, too. This was no possession. I did not even lift the heat of Shell's blood any higher on the stove of her, not necessarily. Shell saw Neve's face, her smile, and took in her body, and something in Shell's own body made a decision."

"She'd felt very little other than the same gradient of miserable after the extremity of her own sorrow had become boring to even her. she will find new pain to thrill through herself in no time. I will lead her there and she will, I am sure, follow me like I am a miracle.

I am, though.

A miracle."

"She hadn't felt this good in a year, maybe more...This might have been my work, my pollen in the air, or it might have been that Shell was so lonely, so desperate to belong that even the run-down brutalism of a desolate shopping mall could easily feel romantic to her. The romance might have begun with Neve, but it certainly began to extend to the crown."

"I liked Daniel. I understood him to be good. I have listened to him and what the inside of him sounds like, and he meets the pain of others with love. The things he has overcome are not what he wears in his manner. It is a deep feat to move with grace when you have been granted little to none. I would never see Daniel hurt again in his life. At night, when Daniel prays, it is for love. And love I would grant him. I am not close to him in any way other than my leaves and vines and listening —I do not hold him the way I hold my Never — but my vines are around him still. If Neve was not my favourite, my best one, it would perhaps be somebody like Daniel."

"Bec had that impact on people; I witnessed it again and again. She had that same frustrating smoothness that Jen did: a confidence that I could never quite break through. I understood why she and Jen liked each other. It must have been a relief for them to be in each other's company, so little insecurity between them. I preferred, myself, to ignore Bec. I did not enjoy her."

"Neve orbited her, a clumsy satellite, saying almost nothing, a face dappled with acne, eyes glassy and already holding a secret bigger than her body. She was good at secrets. Perhaps this was what drew me towards her, the first thing I liked most about her — she had a lot of space for me to grow. I would find more chambers in her for more secrets, over time, the girl a cathedral, a mall with an empty store for each bad thing she did for me, for each witnessing."

"It feels like we did nothing but talk for the first few years. It was when the talking stopped that I knew it was over: you have to learn to love somebody in the quiet of themselves, as well as the noise, the chatter. I'm not sure she loved me quiet, either"

"The Sensation of relief is like a heavy, hard thing inside the body dissolving, returning to blood. I am that heavy thing, and she cannot loosen herself of me but she still felt lightness. I said, You will never be free of me, and she said, loud, through the chambers of her body, Yes I will."

"She was trying to pretend she didn't need me, shutting down the part of herself that had so closely been my attendant for as long as I have been this side of earth. As if there weren't blood on her hands, too, oh, finding her exit, finding her sweet second life after me. There is no life after me, Neve. There is nothing after me, only us."

"A wolf in orchid's clothing."

"The ache this gave her was dull, not sharp. You can feel sorrow of a thing that is gone without wanting it back, like mourning the version of yourself who was happy — for whom this was enough."

"She was simply acting out, we knew. It was a lot to hold. Not everyone had our fortitude, our peace when faced with a dead thing. Flowers are dead, the second they are cut from the ground they're gone, but they have the unique property of growing more beautiful as they take towards the wilt, the rot. The Neve part of us had known, in life, exactly how to handle death, both in her art and in her material quality of what it cost to feed the Baby part of us. This is why we were the perfect match. She had what was needed."

"The reek of disaster would float over the schools and to the motorway. For miles, people would wonder what it was, the stench. How disaster carries."