Everything ends, people move on, they don't look back. It's how they should be.

All this time, I thought we were growing apart because I was leaving Lena behind. But really it was the reverse. She was learning to lie. She was learning to love.

Two weeks until your cure" she says finally. "Sixteen days" I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

The rules of Panic are simple. Anyone can enter. But only one person will win.

I used to think that's what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.

I need him to know that I came for him. I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him.