As he closed the door he said over his shoulder, "Because you're a good lass." A heavy sigh. "And I'm no' a good man.

I looked from one to the other, and realized that Barrons and my dad were having one of those wordless conversations he and I have from time to time. Though the language was, by nature, foreign to me, I grew up in the Deep South where a man’s ego is roughly the size of his pickup truck, and women get an early and interesting education in the not-so-subtle roar of testosterone.

I don't know about you, but I call impromptu vomiting harm.

Nobody looks good in their darkest hour. But it's those hours that make us what we are. We stand strong, or we cower. We emerge victorious, tempered by our trails, or fracture by a permanent, damning fault line.

And when he did that, my hands curled into fists because I thought about touching his face like maybe I could catch joy in my hands and hold it.

The battle had been invisible to the naked eye, but the hardest ones are.

For the record, Irish," he informed her tightly, just in case she got the wrong idea, "I kneel to no one.