That was what a best friend did: hold up a mirror and show you your heart.

It was true; always had been. Friendships were like marriages in that way. Routines and patterns were poured early and hardened like cement.

What good did it do to light the world on fire if she had to watch the glow alone?

The hallmark of my books is the relationships that define women's lives.

It is a kiss that, once begun, never really ends. Interrupted, yes. Paused, certainly. But from that very moment onward, Vera sees the whole of her life as only a breath away from kissing him again. On that night in the park, they begin the delicate task of binding their souls together, creating a whole comprising their separate halves.

Honestly, I believe that the mother-daughter relationship is magical, complex, potentially dangerous, profoundly powerful, and deeply transformative. To put it simply, all of us have this relationship, and in a very real way, "none of us comes out alive." We are all formed first as daughters and then tested as mothers. There's nothing like motherhood to make us reassess how we were as daughters.

Then he left her there, standing alone, surrounded by word ghosts; things she could have said.