Everything looks stark and vivid and frozen, as though drawn precisely and outlined in ink - parents' smiles frozen, camera flashes blinding, mouths open and white teeth glinstening, dark glossy hair and deep blue sky and unrelenting light, everyone drowning in light - everything so clear and perfect I'm sure it must already be a memory, or a dream.

You have to go forward: It's the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.

I'm mesmerized by the way his fingers move confidently along her skin, as though her body is his to reat and touch and tend to. She was mine before she was yours: The words are there, unexpectedly, surging from my throat to my tongue. I swallow them back.

If singing were a feeling it would be this, this light, this lifting, like laughing.

If Cassie was invalidated because she caught the disease, or because Fred suspected her of it, I can only imagine what he will do to me and to my family if he discovers that the cure did not work perfectly.

The first one, we’ll name Blue.

I still wanted to know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as though any answer would be satisfying.