““Whenever Sadie sees engagement rings, she feels a strange mix of emotions: a kind of excitement mixed with a vague sadness. A longing for a speci??c kind of inclusion she both aspires to and fears. And, oddly, she feels a sense of failure, of shame. She knows it’s nonsensical, but there it is, big inside her, this sense of having screwed everything up, of having lost something she never had.””
![“. . .—we’d been there [at a restaurant] for hours, laughing over little things but being serious too, very grave, she being both generous and receptive (this was another thing about her; she listened, her attention was dazzling–I never had the feeling that other people listened to me half as…” quote by Donna Tartt](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/f3a/donna-tartt-391_different-person_we-d-been-there-at-a-restaurant-for-hour_2009023.jpg)
