Blue stretched her hand out. Adam took it without hesitation, like he'd been waiting for her to offer it. He said in a low voice, just for her, "My heart is beating like crazy right now." Strangely enough, it was not his fingers twined in hers that affected Blue the strongest, it was where his warm wrist pressed against hers above their hands.

In the end, he was nobody to Adam, he was nobody to Ronan. Adam spit his words back at him and Ronan squandered however many second chances he gave him. Gansey was just a guy with a lot of stuff and a hole inside him that chewed away more of his heart every year.

Life's pain. You just have to get over as much of it as you can. -Isabel Culpeper

It could kill you," Maura said. Then there was the awkward moment that arrives when two thirds of the people in the room know that the other third is supposed to die in fewer than nine months, and the person who is meant to die is not one of the ones in the know.

Gansey studied Adam's erratic handwriting. His letters always looked like they were running from something.

That," he said, "is so not the point of this conversation.

Imagine my delight and awe when I discovered such a thing was a real genre - contemporary fantasy or urban fantasy. It was like having my birthday twice in one week and cookie dough for breakfast.