I loved Alex so much that it was easier to let him hurt me than to watch him hurt himself.

She wanted him to tell her that when you love someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong.

Iknew that all the attributes he was teased for, at age five, were going to work in his favor by thetime he was thirty-five...but I couldn't get him there overnight. You can't fast-forward your child'slife, no matter how much you want to.

Me, I was already jaded and tarnished, skeptical that a fantasy world could keep reality at bay.

[Jules] slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. “Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we’re out of purgatory for the weekend.” “Maybe later,” I murmur, still distracted by the day’s previous events. “So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested.” “Huh?” I say.

There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.

and another claimed it was inherited through a parent who was a carrier of the defective gene. I had always assumed the latter was the case with Claire. After all, surely a child who grew out of grief would be born with a heavy heart.