You can't be real," Delilah murmurs. "Says who?" I ask. "Did you really think that a story exists only when you're reading it?

Why are you doing this to yourself? When something bad happens, why do you have to pick at it until it bleeds all over again?

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

When you look into your baby’s eyes,” Lacy said softly, “you see everything you hope they can be…not everything you wish they won’t become.

I closed my eyes and curled my fists around the things I knew for sure: That a scallop has thirty-five eyes, all blue. That a tuna will suffocate if it ever stops swimming. That I was loved. That this time, it was not me who broke

You live and let live, eventually that becomes enough.

I believed the reason there was a God was to prevent such atrocities from happening to the same person twice. But nothing prepared me for this: I have done what I've sworn I could never do; I have become my own nightmare... I have lost control.