The legal system works really well, if you communicate a certain way. But if you don't, it all goes to Hell in a handbasket really quickly.

I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn't be the cost of failure for a good friend.

There are certain things I do not talk about.

She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.

The reason I am still sitting at Josef's kitchen table is the same reason traffic slows after a car wreck- you want to see the damage; you can't let yourself pass without that mental snapshot. We are drawn to horror even as we recoil from it.

He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat.

Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever... promises break. Hearts break.