Sometimes Thomas Mackee will stick an earphone into my ear and ask me to listen to a song. When I get over the revulsion of putting something in my ear that's been in his, I sit back and let the music take over, and for a half hour there's something comforting about someone's heart beating at the same rhythm as mine.

If you weren't driving, I'd kiss you senseless," I tell him. He swerves to the side of the road and stops the car abruptly. "Not driving any more.

We were playing Rock, Paper, Scissors," she told him once. "I was paper and she was rock so I lived and she died.

What do you want from me?" he asks. What I want from every person in my life, I want to tell him. More.

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.

Lucian was beginning to get used to hearing her small observations at night. More than anything, he realized he liked her voice in the dark. It made him feel less lonely.

How seven days had passed since she had disappeared from existence. That it would take the eyes of the gods to find her. Or the heart of the Lumateran exile.