Paperwork is a magic in and of itself. It makes spouses out of strangers, makes homes out of houses…and mades students out of runaways. - Seanan McGuire

Hope hurts. That's what you need to learn, and fast, if you don't want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left. Ely-Eleanor is always saying 'don't use this word' and 'don't use that word,' but she never bans the ones that are really bad. She never bans hope.

Then Angela turned on Kade, and said, “I meant what I said. It’s sick, how you pretend like you’re something you’re not.”
“I was about to say the same thing to you,” said Christopher. “I mean, you always did a pretty good job of pretending to be a decent human being. You had me fooled.”

Of course this was all real. She had had her share of wild and beautiful dreams, but never anything like this. And if she hadn’t dreamed it, it had to be real, and if it was real, of course they were still there. Real places didn’t go away just because you’d had a nap.