When he wins the bet, I tell Griggs that it will take me a lifetime to save up two trillion dollars and he tells me that he's only giving me seventy years.

What were you doing with her?" I ask quietly. "Apart from questioning her about your whereabouts, I was listening to the most intriguing story about my life moonlighting as a kidnapper.

The truth doesn't set you free, you know. It makes you feel awkward and embarrassed and defenseless and red in the face and horrified and petrified and vulnerable.

Women are elephants and watch the way you say that in front of them because they'll think you're calling them fat and there's no coming back from that moment. But they hoard. They say they don't, but they do. We think that if something's not spoken about again, it goes away. It doesn't. Nothing goes away just like that.

They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty,” they’d joke. Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.

So between you and me," I tell Justine on the phone that night, "we're either bitchy or stupid." "Oh God," she moans. "Everyone thinks I'm an idiot." "Thanks!

Then I choose to drown. In hope. Rather than float into nothing.