Sometimes I think the human heart is just a simple shelf. There is only so much you can pile onto it before something falls off an edge and you are left to pick up the pieces.

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

What's stronger-the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.

Peter curled his hands into fists at his sides. 'Kiss me,' he said. She leaned towards him slowly, until her face was too close to be in focus. Her hair fell over Peter's shoulder like a curtain and her eyes closed. She smelled like autumn-like apple cider and slanting sun and the snap of the coming cold. He felt his heart scrambling, caught inside the confines of his own body. Josie's lips landed just on the edge of his, almost his cheek and not quite his mouth. 'I'm glad I wasn't stuck in here alone,' she said shyly, and he tasted the words, sweet as mint on her breath.

How many times would I throw this away before I realized it was what I had been looking for all along?

The apple . . . came before Adam and Eve in the story of creation. It had to have been there at least three years because that's how long it takes for a new tree to bear fruit.