No one can tell us no. No one can make us stop. We have picked each other and the rest of the world can go to hell.

Everything I see and touch reminds me of him, and so everything I see and touch is perfect.

I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.

Both of us will die today, gunned down or smashed up or exploded in some terrible moment of fire and twisted metal, and when they go to bury us we'll be so melted together and entwined they won't be able to separate the bodies; pieces of him will go with me, and pieces of me will go with him.

There are more of us than you think.

That’s what you do for family. Anything.

My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.