And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn't quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.

An eye for an eye." "And the whole world goes blind," Coral puts in quietly.

You don't reach points in life at which everything is sorted out for us. I believe in endings that should suggest our stories always continue.

Please understand. Please forgive me. I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful. Don't hate me. I still love you.

For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.

I didn’t know it would be like this,” he says in a whisper. And then: “I’m scared.

He Is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair Is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent If we had ten thousand billion years.