Grace. I held on to that name. If I kept that in my head, I would be OK. Grace. I was shaking, shaking; my skin peeling away. Grace. My bones squeezed, pinched, pressed against my muscles. Grace. Her eyes held me even after I stopped feeling her fingers gripping my arms. Sam," she said. "Don't go.

Sam," she said, and I crushed her to me.

And there is the girl. When I first see her and her dun mare from my vantage point on the cliff road, I am struck first not by the fact that she is a girl, but by the fact that she's in the ocean. it's the dreaded second day, the day people start to die, and no one will get close to the surf. But there she is, trotting up to the knee in the water. Fearless.

I could just barely see the dark curve of his shoulder, and something about the shape it made, the gesture it suggested, filled me with a sort of fierce, awful affection.

I just looked at her, feeling utterly empty. I didn't know what I was supposed to say to her. My life is in that bed. Please let me stay.

It's for personal reasons," I say stiffly, which is what my mother had always told me to say about things that had to do with fighting with your brothers, getting any sort of illness that had intestinal ramifications, starting your period, and money.

Right now, it's hard to imagine that it is raining anywhere in the world.