I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough.

Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.

But how do you ever know that you know a person?

I have always been faithful to you if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.

The things that don't happen to us that we'll never know didn't happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer mauled another car instead of yours. The woman you didn't meet because she couldn't get a taxi to the party you had to leave early from. All of life is a series of nonstories if you look at it that way. We just don't know what they are.

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.