When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires.

How do you walk into someone's life again after twenty-eight years? How do you pick up, when you were too young to know where you left off.

It was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearable sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet.

I would rather be in minority and be right, than in the majority and wrong.

Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.

I'm telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they'd conclude that most people had children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn't one hundred percent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren't very flattering.

Like Connor, Alex protected me -and he was the only person I let close enough to do it. Like Connor, Alex could finish my sentences before I did. But unlike Connor, for whom I had ultimately come too late, I was just in time to take care of Alex.