The Dutch House: A Read with Jenna Pick

“She’s running away,” Emeline said. But Sylvie suspected her sister was running toward something. A new life. Julia wanted to reimagine herself, and it was hard to do that in the presence of people who had known her since she was a small girl.

This transience made Sylvie feel skittish and unfocused—without a home, her movements often felt random. She’d always lived with family, and she hadn’t realized how big a role waking up in the morning to the sounds of her parents, or Julia, played in her feeling like herself.

She had so much and wanted to keep it all. She wanted to leave the father of her children without any relic of the last fifteen years. But that wasn’t the worst part about this. The worst part about this, other than all the other worst parts about this, was that it put Toby into a position where he had to actually think about what he wanted.

The world worked differently than he’d ever imagined. People you loved could leave and there was nothing you could do about it. Once he’d grasped that, the inevitability of leaving, he became a little older in his own eyes.