At a certain point your brain stops to rationalize things. At a certain point it gives up, shuts off, shuts down.

No one had ever told her this basic fact: not everyone got to be loved.

It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.

"And I love you too." His fingers skate the edge of my jaw, dance briefly over my lips. "You should know that. You have to know that."

I wonder if it's ever really possible to know the truth about someone else, or if the best we can do is just stumble into each other, heads down, hoping to avoid collision. I...wonder how many people are clutching secrets like little fists, little rocks sitting in the pits of their stomachs. All of them, maybe.

it occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him--his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven.