Just hold on. Just for a minute." "Are you all right ?" I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong. "I'm fine. I just...I don't want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about...I just...want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.

Do you know how hard it is to say nothing? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I had practiced not saying anything the whole way from the airport, and it was still nearly killing me.

I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.

I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen

I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.

Somewhere in this world is a man who loves you, who understands how precious and clever and kind you are. A man who has always loved you and, to his detriment, suspects he always will.

Believe me, you have to have a certain confidence in your powers of descretion to let a dentist loose with a drill in your mouth less than an hour after you've...um...entertained his wife.