When you're a mom, you learn about fear. You're always afraid. Always. About everything from cupboard doors to kidnappers to weather.

Nothing was easier to shatter than the fragile shield of an idealist.

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

You will always miss her. There will be days - even years from now - when the missing will be so sharp it will take your breath away. But there will be good days, too, months and years of them. In one way or another you'll be searching for her all your life.

Marriages go through hard times. Sometimes you have to get in there and fight for your love. That's the only way for it to get better.

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.

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