Who am I?” he whispered. “For years I pretended I was other than I was, and then I gloried that I might return to the truth of myself, only to find there is no truth to return to. I was an ordinary child, and then I was a not very good man, and now I do not know how to be either of those things any longer. I do not know what I am, and when Jem is gone, there will be no one to show me.

In some ways, we've been through something no one else can ever understand but the two of us... And it made me realize. We are always and absolutely better together.

What you're blaming yourself for is being who you are. And that's no one's fault and nothing you can change.

She unwrapped the blanket when she came in my door. You were inside it. She set you down on the floor and you started ranging around, picking things up, pulling my cat's tail—you screamed like a banshee when the cat scratched you, so I asked your mother if you were part banshee. She didn't laugh.

She looked up at him with a smile. The smile broke what was left of his resistance--shattered it. He had let the walls down when he'd thought she was gone, and there was no time to build them back up.

She had never imagined that the kiss would be so brief and desperate and wild. Or that it would taste of holy water. Holy water and blood.

Please don’t do this—don’t do this to me. If anything happened to you—” He looked at her with surprise. There was already a red stain on the white bandages that wrapped his chest, where his movements had pulled his wound open. “I…” “What?” “I’m not used to you loving me,” he said.