Stacey: "I'm surprised you haven't thrown me out." Comfort: "At your current weight, I'd need some sort of catapult.

She still felt shell-shocked by all of it, numb. Beneath the numbness, though, was a raw and terrible anger that was unlike anything she'd felt before. She had so little experience with genuine anger that it scared her. She actually worried that if she started screaming, she'd never stop.

I guess no one stays friends for more than thirty years without broken hearts along the way.

When you get . . . to the end, you see that love and family are all there is. Nothing else matters.

Nobody's strong enough to be a parent. We just do it, blindly, going forward on faith and love and hope. That's all it is...Being afraid...and going on.

Jude remembered this pain. Every woman had felt some version of it: the end of first love. It was when you learned, for good and always, that love could be impermanent.

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