Little things overwhelm you. Sometimes it's as if everything overwhelms you." "You're right," he'd said, wiping tears and rainwater alike from his ch… - Ali Shaw

"There's no shame in giving up," said Adrien. "I give up on all sorts of things." He whipped out his hip flask and offered it to her. She drank more than he felt he had been offering.

She had lost faith in him so gradually that at first he'd hardly even noticed.

"How did you get to be so fearless?" Adrien asked Hiroko. "I mean, I wish I could deal with all this as naturally as you." "My friend Carter used to say that the world keeps no secrets. Look it in the eye if you can. Everything is there to see." "Is that supposed to make it easier?" "You can look away if you want. Lots of people do. You can make up a whole pretend world to look at instead." Adrien hung his head. He supposed that was precisely his own method, although he wasn't sure that his pretend world was any less frightening than the real one.
If there was one thing Adrien Thomas had always known about himself, it was his limitations. It was not, deep down, woodcraft that he had truly sought to learn here. It was how to be a man who wasn't weak, and who was sure of his place in the world.