That’s the thing you never expect about grieving, what a competition it is.

What is the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?

For the hundredth time tonight, I’m back with Lulu, on Jacques’s barge, the improbably named Viola. She’d just toldme the story of double happiness and we were arguing over the meaning. She’d thought it meant the luck of the boy getting the job and the girl. But I’d disagreed. It was the couplet fitting together, the two halves finding each other. It was love. But maybe we were both wrong, and both right. It’s not either or, not luck or love. Not fate or will. Maybe for double happiness, you need both.

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.

I think everything is happening all the time, but if you don't put yourself in the path of it, you miss it.

There are like twenty people in that waiting room right now. Some of them are related to you. Some of them are not. But we're all your family.' "She stops now. Leans over me so that the wisps of her hair tickle my face. She kisses me on the forehead. 'You still have a family,' she whispers.

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.