The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.

She liked that word: we. It sounded warm and open, like a hug.

But the guilt goes even deeper than that. It, too, is dust: Layers and layers of it have accumulated. Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all. I told on them. I was jealous. God forgive me, for I have sinned.

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.

Amor deliria nervosa. The deadliest of all deadly things.

No guest rooms.” I shake my head resolutely. “I want to be in a room room. A lived-in room.

Happiness is found when no one is looking