Most people can’t stomach silence; it provides too much opportunity to think about things they prefer to avoid.

My heart should be breaking, too, but there comes a point when you’re so inured to loss that you no longer feel the lash.

Have you ever watched a child learning to walk? Before this week, I never had, but there's a certain grace to it. Well, if not grace, then tenacity. Fall down nine times--get up ten. And the tenth time you get where you're going, you don't stop, not for obstacles, not for other people telling you to stop. You don't listen to anything but that inner voice until you arrive where you want to be.

But the world moves on, even when you don't want it to, even when change feels like the end of everything. It never stops.

If I ever win you," he said, anger bright in his pale eyes, "it will be because you want me more. Not because he's gone. I'm nobody's second best.

He is not the same person as when we met, but . . . neither am I. Time has refined us, but instead of pushing us apart, we’re closer than ever.

We stood back-to-back, blocking and striking in harmony; sometimes it felt like his arms and legs were an extension of me. I could count on him to keep them off me from behind.