Nick sat beside Simon, who was at his computer. Marcus stood at attention beside the food. Hale had his feet on the table, reading the morning paper. And someone had given the Bagshaws a gun. 'Pull!' Hamish yelled, and Angus pulled a cord and sent a skeet flying across the deep blue water. A split second later, a loud crack was reverberating across the deck. Kat jumped. Hale sighed. The shot went far wide, and Marcus never moved a muscle.

Easy there," Zach said when I stumbled into him. "Now's probably not the time to get handsy. You might want to control yourself.

He looked as though I'd just run over his pet puppy (though no actual puppies were harmed in the formation of that metaphor).

For all the days of our lives," we finished and I felt a little like a character in one of my grandma's soap operas.

Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.

And I didn't choose it, Kat. I chose you.

I mean she's Cleopatra... shouldn't she and Antony have known better? They were so different..." "Variety is the spice of life" "And from a thousand miles apart" "Absence makes the heart grow fonder