As a child, what I was missing was so much bigger to me than what I had. My mother-mythic, imaginary-was a deity and a superhero and a comfort all at once. If only I'd had her, surely, she would have been the answer to every problem; if only I'd had her , she would have been the cure for everything that ever had gone wrong in my life.

You can believe something really hard,' Faith says, 'and still be wrong.

Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.

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.

Then they scrambled through the window and into the darkness, determined to turn themselves into what they were not.

Even the most beautiful things can be toxic.

It's like the psychiatrists themselves are buying into that stupid belief that therapy is something to hide.