Mia and I had been together for more than two years, and yes, it was a high school romance, but it was still the kind of romance where I thought we were trying to find a way to make it forever, the kind that, had we met five years later and had she not been some cello prodigy and had I not been in a band on the rise - or had our lives not been ripped apart by all this -I was pretty sure it would've been.

Doubt is part of searching. Same as faith.

Okay, maybe this was the meant to be: the universe I knew, loved nothing more than balance.

The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.

I might have been eleven years old and a little socially immature, but I recognized a gauntlet being thrown down when I saw it, and I had no choice but to take it up.

If you can't trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?

A long flight. Jetlag. Immigration. Customs. And then finally, that first step into a new place, that moment of exhilaration and disorientation, each feeding the other. That moment when anything can happen