"I couldn’t look at him, but I sensed his happiness at being included, and for some fucked-up stupid reason, making Tallus happy made me feel like I’d done something right. It was a tiny win for a guy who had spent a lifetime doing everything wrong."

i wasn't expecting to like this quite this much and to actually not figuring out the culprint until the end - it was right on my face! - and so i had loads of fun reading this, which was Such a relief after literally dropping TWO books recently! something i don't even do usually. anyway.

what really hooked me on this was: we have the brute and the sexy one, but the brute actually goes to therapy something i literally don't think i had ever read before, lol. and the seemingly nice one, the one we're supposed to love, because everyone loves him and he's so sexy and charming, he actually does stuff from time to time that make me want to grit my teeth, not because he's not well-written, quite the contrary, it is actually a breath of fresh air to have an unperfect character that is flawed in a run-of-the-mill way, like, he makes mistakes the way any unsuspecting person does. he doesn't mean to.

same way we often don't mean to hurt someone, but because we didn't think something through, because we don't really know better, we end up doing so anyway. or, well, sometimes we do know better, but it's hard to keep it up.

i'm getting off track here, but i genuinely liked this book and i rushed to read the next one right away and almost skipped written this review because of that, lol.