The Silence of the Girls: A Novel

perhaps the agony of losing Patroclus has swallowed every lesser grief.

They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams—and in their worst nightmares too.

It seemed in those few moments as if time had been suspended, that the wave curling over us might never break. Pure delusion, of course. The future was hurtling towards us, Achilles’s life measured now in days not weeks.

If any man love the instruments of any craft, the gods have called him.

sleek-haired, brown-skinned, quick and deft in all her movements; she reminded me of a wren.

Achilles lives in the present. He remembers the past, not without regret, but increasingly without resentment.

She was the youngest of Hecuba’s large family, always running to keep up with her sisters, wailing the great cry of youngest children everywhere, “Wait for me! Wait for me!”

I listened and let it soothe me, that ceaseless ebb and flow, the crash of the breaking waves, the grating sigh of its retreat. It was like lying on the chest of somebody who loves you, somebody you know you can trust—though the sea loves nobody and can never be trusted.

What are they afraid of? That one day they’ll have to endure pain like this? Or that they never will, that they’re incapable of it, because grief’s only ever as deep as the love it’s replaced.