First lines of the novel, “The World It Kills Softly,” which I won’t write today, as it’s Independence Day:

“She lost him on a Tuesday. Together, they had grown up sharing everything. They were Irish twins — born nearly exactly nine months apart. Together, they had perfected forgiveness. They had perfected dreaming, manufacturing lives intertwined, raising nieces and nephews as their own. They didn’t bicker; she couldn’t remember a single argument.

The Leukemia finally took him on that Tuesday night in April of her senior year, just a few short months after the diagnosis. It changed everything. After graduation, she left her family, choosing the Mediterranean and five million strangers over freshman comp. With a box of paint and a Moleskine notebook in a loft above the Dergana district in downtown Algiers, in the company of no one she knew by name, she learned to be herself for the first time. For the first time without him.”

— Damien Willis
July 4, 2017