Hunky Heroes, rescuing distressed women, captive princesses, and girls without wheels since 1684. p. 450

This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.

A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.

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.

I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It's hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside you like a stone.

And when I wake up it's wonderful, like I've been carried quietly onto a calm, peaceful shore, and the dream, and its meaning, has broken over me like a wave and is ebbing away now, leaving me with a single, solid certainty. I know now.

We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.