Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [688]

It wasn’t that I was holding back, being stoic. It’s just that I hated Keith at least as much as I loved him. He was my brother—half-brother—but he was also the most sociopathic person I’ve ever been close to. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 688

Note

A blunt, unrhetorical sentence that refuses the expected mourning script: “hated Keith at least as much as I loved him” stacks the two verbs without hierarchy, and the dash-interpolated correction “—half-brother—” quietly adjusts the claim of kinship mid-sentence, admitting how provisional even that tie was.