The Things We Cannot Say Novels & Stories

"Can you tell us what the bad woman did?" Fear shot through me like lightning. I shook my head frantically. "I cannot. If I tell, she will know. She will come back." "She cannot come back. We will not let her." "She is magic! She can do anything!" The words burst out before I could stop them. Magic. The thing I was not supposed to talk about. The thing that made the bad woman powerful and terrible and unstoppable. Daddy's face went hard. "Magic?" But I could not say more. My throat closed up and the words would not come and I felt like I was choking on secrets that were too big to swallow.

Not with judgment. Not with suspicion. But with something far worse — understanding. “Sometimes,” he said softly, “the things we can’t say weigh heavier than the ones we do.” The words hit somewhere deep in my chest. I didn’t respond. He stepped back only when someone called his name from across the pavilion. But before leaving, he said one last thing — quietly, so only I could hear. “You don’t have to tell the world your truth.” A pause. “But keeping it from yourself… that’s where you start to drown.”

I could not quite identify if it's guilt, perhaps, or fear. “I understand, Mom. I just need space at the moment”. Her voice was gentle, very delicate, and yet there was steel in it. I nodded, but my heart knitted. “Space,” I repeated. “ I know but you must keep in mind that concealing things does not make them go away.,Sometimes the most difficult things of all are the things we must come to know”. She smiled at me a little.

Lucrezia asks frustratingly. ‘Because I can’t Lucrezia. I CAN’T. Those things that you saw, those were just the tip of an iceberg. If I were to tell you about this things, I wouldn’t be able to keep the hard truths from you. You don’t have to know all this things that I can handle myself. There are just truths that someone couldn’t handle.’ I could only stare at her with gritted teeth as I thought of the words I couldn’t say out loud. “I trust you, Lucrezia,” I could only whisper those pathetic words to her.

To show them truth. “We will not bow,” I said, clear and steady, loud enough for every soul there to hear. “We will not shrink. We will not break. We will not be divided. Because we are not wrong. We are not dangerous. We are not the end of the world. We are the beginning of something new. And you cannot crush what is true. You cannot erase what is real. You cannot destroy what is simply… right.”

"I realize this may sound absurd, Katherine. However, I assure you... it is something we are not prepared for. We cannot disclose this to anyone. There are factors involved that you may not fully comprehend." "Factors involved?" I echoed, my voice escalating with irritation. "What do you mean? You are speaking in enigmas, and you are injured! How can you even consider keeping this a secret at this moment?" She momentarily closed her eyes, as if attempting to compose herself, and when she resumed speaking, her voice was nearly a whisper. "I cannot articulate it well... but there are entities out there. Entities we cannot perceive. People... they are pursuing us. I am uncertain if it is due to

We can't say what we want to say because we're afraid of what they'll say when we reveal what's in our hearts. In their eyes, we have to be okay.

“You can’t help yourself.” “First things first. We need to be more careful about what we do while we’re still in this mess. If they find out about us, the entire world will watch you. That will jeopardize your future, and it will be my fault. I’ll never be able to forgive myself.”

And she hadn’t breathed a word of what she intended to do that day, even out loud to herself. “David,” Lauren asked as she set up the blue pieces for herself, “can you . . . ?” She hesitated, because she felt that to say what she was thinking out loud would be like crossing the Rubicon. Her sixth- grade social studies teacher, Mr. Connolly, had used that phrase once and when she asked what he meant, he told her it was a way of saying a step that you couldn’t take back. There are so many things happening that I don’t understand, she thought. And I think that I need to understand.

She smiled when Haerin felt the wind, didn't reply back to her. After a long moment, Crystal started saying. "When things in life get difficult for us, we think there’s no way for us to survive in this world. But I don't think that way, I will adamantly tell you that it isn’t true. We think we can't survive because of that word 'think.' We set our minds on it. We force our brains to think that we can't survive." She paused.