With these words Jake had let go of me. Which proved that he knew more about why I was leaving than even I did. I had believed that I was running away from what had happened. I did not know, not until I met Nicholas days later, that the whole time I was really running towards what was yet to be.

Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.

And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in masquerade.

What makes you walk past thirty-thousand people without a second glance, and then you look at the thirty-thousandth-and-first person and know you'll never take your eyes off her again?

Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they've been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.

Isn't it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?

I learn from my own daughter that you don’t have to be awake to cry.