This is the problem with forever friends. They know too much.

The at-home mother's life: it was a race with no finish line.

Thoughts - even fears - were airy things, formless until you made them solid with your voice and once given that weight, they could crush you.

It’s a promise ring,” he said solemnly. “The lady at the store said it’s what you give the girl you love. It means I want to marry you someday.

He was afraid that the secrets she'd kept would always be here, inside him, an ugly malignant thing lodged near enough to his heart to upset its rhythm, and though it could be removed, cut out, there would always be scars; bits and pieces of it would remain in his blood, making it wrong somehow, so that if he accidentally sliced his skin open, his blood would--for one heartbeat--flow as black as India ink before it remembered that it should be red.

I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I'd like to be known.

A romance novel focuses exclusively on two people falling in love. It can't be about a woman caring for her aging mother or something like that. It can have that element, but it has to be primarily about the male-female relationship.