{"product_id":"half-broken-things-isbn-9780440242444","title":"Half Broken Things","description":"A gripping tale of psychological suspense perfect for the readership of Minette Walters and Ruth Rendell, \u003cb\u003eHalf Broken Things \u003c\/b\u003eis a novel that peers into the lives of three dangerously lost people…and the ominous haven they find when they find each other.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJean is a house sitter at the end of a dreary career. Steph is nine months pregnant and on the run. And Michael is a thief. Through a mixture of deceit, good luck, and misfortune, these three damaged loners have come together at a secluded country home called Walden Manor. Now all three have found what they needed most: a new beginning, a little kindness, a little love. Living off the manor’s riches, tending its grounds and gardens, they leave the outside world far behind and build a happiness so long denied them. That is, until the first unexpected visitor arrives...igniting a chain reaction that is at once spellbinding and disastrous.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA stunning, thought-provoking crime novel of chilling moral complexity, \u003cb\u003eHalf Broken Things\u003c\/b\u003e is a gripping, haunting exploration of love and our need for it, of the damage done when we go long without it, and the deeds we might be driven to in its name.\"Psychological suspense of the highest order ... brilliantly conceived.... This is a must-read.\"—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Surrealistic, unsettling ... made spookier by Joss' polite, poetic prose.\"—\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (A-)Morag Joss grew up on the west coast of Scotland. Her first Sara Selkirk novel, \u003cb\u003eFuneral Music\u003c\/b\u003e, was nominated by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association for the Dilys Award for the year’s favorite mystery. Her fourth novel, \u003cb\u003eHalf Broken Things\u003c\/b\u003e, won the 2003 CWA Silver Dagger Award. Morag Joss lives in the country outside the city of Bath and in London.\u003ci\u003eJanuary\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWalden Manor  August\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      This is not what it might look like. We’re quiet people. As a general rule  extraordinary things do not happen to us, and we are not the type to go  looking for them. But so much has happened since January, and I started  it. Things began to happen, things I must have brought about somehow  without quite foreseeing where they would lead. So I feel I must explain,  late in the day though it is. I’m going to set out, as clearly as I can,  in the order in which they occurred, the things that have happened here.  And I shall find it difficult because I was brought up not to draw  attention to myself and I’ve never been considered a forthcoming person,  never being one to splurge out on anything, least of all great long  explanations. Indeed, Mother always described me as secretive. But that  was because, with her, I came to expect my reasons for things to be not so  much misunderstood as overlooked or mislaid, and so early on I stopped  giving them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Father was usually quiet, too. When I think back to the sounds of the  house in Oakfield Avenue where I grew up, I do not remember voices. I  think we sighed or cleared our throats more often than we spoke words. I  remember mainly the tick of Father’s longcase clock in the dining room we  never ate in, and then after the clock had gone, a particular silence  throughout the house that I thought of as a shade of grey. And much later  when I was an adult, still there looking after Mother, the most regular  sound was the microwave. It pinged a dozen times a day. In fact, until  recently, whenever I heard a certain tone of ping, in a shop or somewhere  like that, I would immediately smell boiling milk. But when I was a child  there was just the clock, with silences in between.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mother had few words herself. She often went about the house as if she  were harbouring unsaid things at great personal cost, with a locked look  on her mouth. That being so, I suppose Father and I felt unable to open  our own mouths very much. What happens to all the things you might say or  want to say, but don’t? Well, they don’t lie about in your head  indefinitely, waiting to be let out. For a time they may stay there quite  patiently, but then they shuffle off and fade until you can’t locate them  any more, and you realise they’re not coming back. By then you’re past  caring.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So I grew to think of myself as someone not in particular need of words. I  did not acquire the habit of calling them up; not many at a time at least,  not even to myself in my own head. Things in my head had been very quiet  for a long time, before all this.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But I have been wrong about this aspect of myself, as about others. I find  that there are words there after all. Now that I need them, my words have  come crowding back, perhaps because I have a limited time in which to get  them all down (today is the 20th, so only eleven more days). I am pleased  that my hands remember the old touch-typing moves without seeming to  involve me at all. The letters are hitting the paper in this old  typewriter almost as if they were being shot out of my finger-ends. Which  is just as well, because I’m busy enough dealing with all the clamouring  words that are flinging themselves around in my head, fighting over which  gets fired out first. I’m in a hurry to let them loose. I want to explain,  because it is suddenly extremely urgent and important that, in the end, we  are not misunderstood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And I shall try to put down not just what, but why things have happened  and why none of it could have turned out any differently. Until now I  really haven’t thought about the why. Time’s the thing. I haven’t had  time, not time of the right kind, to ask myself why things have gone the  way they have. I’ve been too busy being happy; even now I’m happy,  although the time left is of the other kind. But I’m quite content to  spend it trying to puzzle it all out and write it down. It’s a pleasant  way to pass time, sitting over the typewriter at the study window and  looking out now and then to wave at them (that’s Michael, Steph and  Charlie) down there in the garden. They’re not doing much. Steph is  singing to Charlie and rocking him on her lap: ‘Row, row, row the  boat’—that’s one of Charlie’s favourites—and the more she rocks the more  he likes it. They’re waving back now. I’ve told them I’ve got to write a  report for the agency and in a way, that’s almost true, so they’re making  pretend-sad faces up at me because I can’t spend the afternoon with them.  And now Steph’s got hold of Charlie’s wrist and she’s making him wave too.  Behind them, I can see three different kinds of Michaelmas daisy in the  border, three nice shades of purple. But the roses are on their second  flowering now and look as if the air’s gone out of them, as if they’ve  stayed too long at the party.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Anyway, I’m going off the point. I was saying that I’m going to explain  everything. And while I cannot imagine any explanation for anything that  does not also contain an element of justification, I am not trying to  offer excuses for what we have done. But nor am I apologising, quite,  except for the mess and inconvenience, which are bound to be considerable.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So how did it start? With the letter from the agency? Or with the  advertisement I placed? Perhaps much earlier, years and years ago, with  Jenny. Jenny is the niece I invented for myself. Yes, perhaps that reveals  a tendency. She started as just a little harmless face-saving white lie  which of course led to others, and in no time at all the fact that she did  not exist was neither here nor there. My niece became quite real to me, or  as real as somebody living in Australia ever could be, in my mind. I  haven’t travelled abroad.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No, now that I reflect, it started with this place, with the house itself.  Because the house made me feel things from the very first which perhaps I  should find strange, it being my fifty-eighth. Memories are a little  blurred after fifty-seven in eighteen years, but I do know I’d never felt  things before. This is the fifty-eighth house, although I’ve sat some  houses more than once because people used to ask for me again. I  specialise, or I did, in long stays. ‘We have the perfect lady, flexible,  no ties, usually available’ was how I was recommended. I spell this out  just so that it is clear that I have been well thought of. Inexperience  has nothing to do with it. Nor was it anything to do with malice or  jealousy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The house when I came was full of old things; fuller than it is now, for  reasons I will come to. Many of them were not in mint condition, and I  liked them like that. I liked the way they sat about the house in little  settlements, as if they had sought one another out and were sticking  together, little colonies of things on small island table tops. There were  the boxes: workboxes with velvet linings and silver spools and scissors  and dear little buttonhooks, boxes with tiny glass bottles with stoppers  missing, writing boxes still cedar scented and ink-stained on the inside,  yellowed carved ivory boxes, and painted and enamel ones—I suppose for  snuff, those ones—but I wasn’t concerned about their original purpose.  Then there were the small silver things in the drawing room, the heavy  paper knife with a swan’s head, the magnifying glass, a round box with a  dent, the filigree basket with the twisted handle, a vase for a single  rose. The blue and white porcelain in the dining room, some of it chipped,  and the fans in the case in the library, of beaded lace, faded painted  parchment and tired-looking feathers. Even some of the books: nearly  everything else was modern, but on three shelves there were sets of very  old books with cracked spines and faint titles. They all had that look of  being dusted in cinnamon and gave off a leafy smell that reminded me of  church. Inside, many of the pages were loose, and so thin that the print  on the other side grinned right through the words when I tried to read, as  if they were not unreadable enough already.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But all these things seemed content in their imperfections; they were not  shouting out to be mended the way new things are. New things so often  break before there has been time for them to fade and crumble. Here, it  was as if the things had simply been around long enough to be dropped or  bent or knocked, and every one of these minute, accidental events had been  patiently absorbed, as if the things knew themselves to be acceptable and  thought beautiful just as they were. If objects could give contented  sighs, that’s what these would have done. I wanted to be like that. I  wondered if I, also fading and crumbling as everything does in the end,  could be like that. Yes, I remember wondering that right from the start,  in those first few days of January.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The third day, like the first two, slipped away and got lost somewhere in  the folds of the afternoon. As before, Jean had made the dusting of the  objects in the house last for most of the morning. She had vacuumed the  floors again and cleaned her bathroom, unnecessarily. After her lunch of  milky instant coffee and biscuits she tidied round the kitchen. When she  could fool herself no longer that there was anything left to do she  mounted the carved wooden stairs and walked the upper floors, again  feeling mildly inquisitive, as if the house and the rest of the day might  be conspiring to withhold something from her. Again, pointlessly, she  tried the three doors she knew to be locked. Then she wandered with less  purpose, pausing here and there, her vague eyes watching how light  displaced time in the many other rooms of the house. Light entered by the  mullioned windows, stretched over floors and panelled walls and lay down  across empty beds. It lay as cold and silent as a held breath over  furniture and objects and over Jean lingering in each doorway; it claimed  space usually taken by hours and minutes which, outside, continued to  pass. Through windows to the west Jean saw how the wind was moving the  bare trees that bordered the fields; through the south windows she watched  grass shivering in the paddock, watched as clouds pasted onto the sky  bulged and heaved a little. Inside, the afternoon aged; its folds sank and  deepened, closed over the last of the daylight and sucked it in. When it  was quite dark Jean walked again from room to room, touching things gently  and drawing curtains. So the third day passed, with Jean watching as it  seemed not to do so, unaware that she was waiting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She was keeping the letter from the agency in the pocket of   her thick new cardigan, the Christmas present she had bought   and wrapped for herself so that she would have something to open ‘from my  niece Jenny in Australia’ in front of the other residents   on Christmas morning. For this year, finding herself again be-  tween house-sitting jobs over the holiday, she had been obliged to spend  Christmas at the Ardenleigh Guest House. It was Jean’s fifth Christmas  there in eighteen years, and Jenny had sprung into being the very first  time when, one day at breakfast, a depressed old lady had invited Jean to  agree with her that Christmas was quite dreadful when you were getting on  and nobody wanted you. It had sounded like an accusation; Jean had then  been in her late forties but suspected she looked older. She ignored the  assumption about her age and concentrated on the ‘unwanted’ allegation.  She heard herself saying, Oh, but I didn’t have to come here! In fact my .  . . my niece begged me to come to her! But I told her oh no, I shan’t come  this year, thank you, dear. Thank you, Jenny dear, I said, but no, I’ll  make other arrangements. And then of course the old lady had asked her  why. Oh, well. Well, she’s having a baby soon, her third. So I thought, it  wouldn’t be fair to add to the workload this year. Then she added, in a  voice loaded with dread, You see, she’s not having an easy pregnancy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Several of the residents were permanent, and the next time Jean had to  spend Christmas there one of them asked, too eagerly, how the niece was  getting on. She could not bear to disappoint—it was as if during the  intervening two years the residents had been on the edge of their seats  waiting for news—so she found herself telling them about the baby (quite a  toddler now, into everything!), adding that this year they were away,  spending Christmas with Jenny’s husband’s family. And it was the same the  next time, at which point Jean lost her nerve and packed them all off to  live in Australia. But she discovered that the Ardenleigh residents had  formed a high opinion of Jenny, and it did not seem right to Jean to sully  her niece’s reputation by allowing her, just because she had emigrated, to  forget her old aunt in England. It did not seem the kind of thing Jenny  would do. So for Ardenleigh Christmases she now produced Jenny’s  thoughtful present, relieved not to have to produce also another reason,  beyond the unbearably long flight (at her age), for not spending Christmas  ‘Down Under’.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But this year it seemed that Jenny had slipped up, because the cardigan  was not a success. Jean had chosen it thinking its colour ‘amethyst’ and  realised, now that it had been hers for over a week, that it was just a  muddy purple. But it did not occur to her not to wear it even though it  now disappointed; she wrapped herself snugly into her mistake just as she  kept the letter close as a reminder to be at all times braced against the  temptation to forget it. It lay in her cardigan pocket. In the mornings,  bending to dust the feet of a table or to unplug the vacuum cleaner, Jean  would sometimes feel it crackle next to her, as if a small, sharp part of  herself had broken off and was hanging loose against her side. It puzzled  her, almost, to find that she was not actually in pain. Sometimes she  would take the envelope from her pocket and look at it, but she did not  read the letter again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yet, somewhere in the course of the afternoons, Jean would arrive at an  amnesty with the presence of the letter. As daylight took its leave, it  seemed to wrap up and bear away the threat that seeped from her cardigan  pocket. She could feel that the letter itself was still there, but she  would begin to regard it with a sort of detached astonishment, which grew  into simple disbelief that marks on a piece of paper should hold any power  over her. Walking from room to room, switching on lamps, it seemed amazing  to her that only this morning she had thought the letter had any meaning  at all. Here, in this soft lamplight, how could it? And as the day  darkened further, the picture of herself accepting some pointless words in  an envelope hidden inside her cardigan grew more and more improbable. By  night time, when she had settled at the drawing-room fire and the peace of  the house was at its deepest, the very notion of eight months hence was  simply incredible. Here, if she wanted it, the future could be as dim and  distant as she preferred the past to be.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the fourth day Shelley from the agency telephoned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Hello?’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Is that Walden Manor?’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Yes? Hello?’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Who is this? Jean, is that you? Jean? It’s Shelley, from Town and Country  Sitters. Did you get our letter?’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Oh. Oh yes. Yes, I got the letter.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Jean disliked Shelley. She had met her in person only once, when a  householder had insisted that his keys should not be sent through the post  to the sitter and Jean had had to travel to the office in Stockport to  collect them. She knew she ought to try to feel sorry for her. Shelley was  burdened both by asthma and by a disproportionately large chest, which  together gave the impression that her breasts were actually two  hardworking outside lungs, round and wide, inelastic and over-inflated.  Jean now pictured them rising and falling and pulled her purple cardigan  round her own neat shoulders, swaying in a wave of panic that suddenly  washed through her. She waited with the receiver held some distance away,  trying to calm herself, while Shelley caught her breath at the other end.  She guessed that Shelley would be at her desk, winding the telephone flex  around the ringed index finger of her free hand, her unbuttoned jacket of  the navy businesswoman sort skimming the sides of her blouse-clad bosom  with the whish and crackle of acetate meeting acetate. Possibly this was  adding to the gusts of noise that Jean could hear over the phone, now, as  if some battle that she could not see were being fought somewhere in the  distance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Right, well, Jean,’ Shelley managed at last, ‘so you’ve had our  confirmation. Basically I just wanted to check if you’ve got any queries.  You’re okay as regards the contents of the letter, are you? Unfortunately  we won’t be in a position to offer you any further employment after the  expiry of this current contract. I mean, we had said, hadn’t we. I did  say.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Jean said nothing, knowing that her silence would be considered a  difficult one.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Shelley told her, ‘We don’t like terminating people but it’s company  policy. Town and Country’s not in a position to keep people on past  retirement age, we’re not allowed. It’s the insurance.’ Breathing of a  struggling, bovine kind followed this long speech. ‘I mean, you’ve done  sterling work. But you’ve already had four years past sixty. Right. So.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Still Jean said nothing, so Shelley changed tack. ‘So, you’re doing okay,  are you, Jean, as regards the location of the property? Okay popping out  and getting your bits and pieces? Because they did say it’d be better for  a car owner as you’ve got over a mile to the village and it might be  lonely. They said really it’d suit a slightly younger person with a car  and maybe a part time job in the area, though I did tell them you were  very professional and okay with a mile. You are okay, Jean, are you?’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘There’s been a breakage,’ Jean announced. ‘Today, while I was dusting. A  teapot on the sideboard. Blue and white, Chinese, with silver mountings.  Not very large.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There was another wait while Shelley prepared the tone of her reply and  Jean heard the breathing grow unmistakably irritated. ‘Well, you’ve just  proved my point. We have to fork out the excess on that now. You’ll need  to find it on the inventory and notify us and we’ll have to tell the  owners. You have got the inventory, haven’t you? It was in with the rest  of the paperwork, with our letter and the owners’ list, you know, all  their do’s and don’ts?’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Yes, I’ve got the paperwork. And the list, all the do’s and don’ts.  Plenty of them.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Yes, well, that’s their prerogative. People can go a bit over the top,  especially when they can’t meet the sitter themselves. The Standish-Caves  had to fly out the day before you arrived, that was all explained, wasn’t  it?’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The list of instructions and grudging permissions for the house sitter  that had come from the owners, via the agency, filled several typed pages.  They were wide-ranging: no open fires, no candles, do not use the dining  room or drawing room, use TV in small sitting room, use only kitchen  crockery, do not use the cappuccino machine or the ice cream maker, always  wear gloves to dust the books, beeswax polish only—no silicone sprays, you  are welcome to finish any opened jars, unplug the television at night.  Jean hugged her cardigan closer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘You’d think I’d never house-sat before. You’d think I don’t know the  first thing.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Well, you can’t blame them, can you, especially not now something’s  broken. It is their house.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘I could have a go at mending it. I’ve still got the bits.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Don’t touch it! They’ll want it properly mended, if it’s even worth  doing. These clients are very particular, that’s why they’re using us.  That’s why you’re there. Oh, Jean.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There was more laborious breathing from Stockport until Jean finally  cleared her throat and said, ‘Sorry.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Shelley said, rather quickly, ‘Well, I’m sure you are but I mean this is  the point, isn’t it? This is just the point. You are sixty-four. Suppose  it happens again? Suppose you had a fall or something—well, our clients  are paying for peace of mind, which they’d not be getting, would they, not  in that particular scenario. No way they’d be getting peace of mind if  Town and Country let their sitters go on too long.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘It’s only small. They probably wouldn’t even miss it, there are hundreds  of things here.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Jean, you’re in a people business. The client’s needs come first. That’s  key. Isn’t it? You’re in the client’s home.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Jean sniffed. ‘You don’t have to tell me that. I have been doing this  eighteen years.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Yes, and maybe that’s why it’s time to call it a day, isn’t it? After  all, we’ve all got to retire sometime, haven’t we? I should think you  could do with a rest! Where is it you’re retiring to, again?’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There was another wait while Jean said nothing because she did not know,  and Shelley shored up her elective forgetfulness against the disturbing  little truth that for eighteen years the agency had corresponded with  Jean, on the very rare occasions when there was a gap between  house-sitting assignments, care of a Mrs Pearl Costello (proprietrix) at  the Ardenleigh Private Guest House in East Sussex somewhere. St Leonard’s,  was it? This year Jean had asked as usual for an assignment that would  span Christmas, and they had nothing for her until this one at Walden  Manor, beginning on January 3rd. Shelley sighed with an audible crackle as  her jacket shifted on her shoulders. All right, so Jean had no family. But  today was Shelley’s first Monday back from ‘doing’ Christmas for fourteen  people of four generations in a three-bedroomed house, and she told  herself stoutly that family life could be overrated. Jean probably had a  ball at the Ardenleigh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Going to retire to the seaside, are you, Jean?’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘I’m looking at a number of options. I haven’t decided.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘Good for you. Right, well, I’ll let you get on. Send us on a notification  of the breakage. Oh, and can you remember in future when you answer a  client’s phone, you should say, “Walden Manor, the Standish-Cave  residence, may I help you?” It’s a nice touch. You don’t just say hello,  all right? Company policy. And careful with that duster, at least till  you’re enjoying a long and happy retirement!’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Jean put down the telephone in the certain knowledge that Shelley in  Stockport was doing the same with a shake of the head, a crackle of her  clothing and a despairing little remark to the office in general about it  being high time, getting Jean Wade off the books.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That evening Jean lit a fire in the drawing room. When it was well alight,  she drew the agency’s letter from her pocket and laid it carefully over  the flames. Its pages curled, blackened and blazed up as the logs  underneath settled with a hiss and a weak snap of exploding resin that  sounded to Jean, smiling in her deep armchair, more like an approving sigh  followed by faint and affectionate tutting. Only as the flames died, and  to her surprise, did she become aware of a dissatisfaction with the  emptiness of the room. Jean did not acknowledge loneliness. She had long  recognised that two states, solitariness and a kind of sadness, were  constants in her life, merely two ordinary facts of her existence. The two  things might have been related, but as far as she could she left that  possibility unexamined. Because even if they were, what could she do about  it? Like many people who cannot abide self-pity, Jean sometimes felt very  sorry indeed for a buried part of herself whose very existence irked her.  And of course she was alone now, sitting in the glow of the fire and of  warm-shaded lamps, in the low, beamed drawing room with its deep rose  carpet and the heavy drapes pulled against the dark outside. She occupied  a solid wing armchair, one of several chairs in the room which, along with  two sofas, were covered in materials that were all different but belonged  to the same respectable family of chalky old shades of green, pink and  grey. She had never been more comfortable in her life, and she was, of  course, alone. And so what dissatisfied her suddenly, she thought, could  not be simple loneliness, not some unmet desire for a companion, but more  a regret that she was the only person in the world who had seen the short  but satisfying burning of the letter. For it had been a ceremony of a  kind, watching the maroon, swirling print of the letterhead ‘Town \u0026amp;  Country Sitters for total peace of mind’ go up in flames; and ceremonies  should be witnessed even if they are not quite understood, Jean thought.  She could not say exactly what the significance of hers had been, whether  it marked an end or a beginning, a remembrance, an allegiance, a  pledge—but it had been in a way purifying, and there should have been  somebody else here to watch it with her. Somebody who might afterwards  stay a while, and to whom she might talk in her underused voice, all about  the letter, and Mother, and houses and growing old, and who, occupying the  other chair by the fire, would nod and understand. And who, later perhaps,  almost carelessly admiring her cleverness and good taste, would assure her  that one smashed teapot among so many half broken things did not matter,  that all would be well, even that her ill-chosen cardigan was, in fact, a  beautiful shade of amethyst.","brand":"Delta","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303467962597,"sku":"NP9780440242444","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780440242444.jpg?v=1767728620","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/half-broken-things-isbn-9780440242444","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}