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.

There was no black or white. Someone who had been good her entire life could, in fact, do something evil. People were just as capable of committing murder, under the right circumstances, as any monster.

That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes. I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.

You saved me," I said. Nathaniel put his hands on either side of my face. "I had to," he said. "So you could save me back.

...when they look at me, I so badly want to be who they see.

I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?