That was the thing about best friends. Like sisters and mothers, they could piss you off and make you cry and break your heart, but in the end, when the chips were down, they were there, making you laugh even in your darkest hours.

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.

Girls like you can't understand," Julia said, and it was true. Ellie had been popular. She didn't know that some hurts were like a once-broken bone. In the right weather, they could ache for a lifetime.

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

She is like a child picking at a scab, unable to stop herself even though she knows it will hurt.

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

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