I don't know the first thing about holding together a family, especially one that resembles an heirloom vase, shattered but glued back together for its beauty, and no one mentions that you can see the cracks as plain as day.

I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I'd hurt Rob. Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we're trying to protect.

He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat.

Do you know how sometimes - when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?

As it turned out, though, it was a lot easier to say that someone deserved to die for what they did than it was to take the responsibility to make that happen.

You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.

How do you walk into someone's life again after twenty-eight years? How do you pick up, when you were too young to know where you left off.