I love her because she has become something more to me. She become my life.

That morning, she had found an envelope stuffed into her locker. It was from the Mercer Hotel, and held a plastic door key for their suite. "See you there tonight," Oliver had written. "Chomp! Chomp!

This is college?' Schyler asked. 'or Downton Abbey?

Maybe she'd been drinking too much of the super-sweet Mexican Coca-Cola they had down here. Or maybe she was just tired, alone, and far from home. Because somewhere in the brittle, concrete center of Azrael's dark heart, something was melting.

Memories were moving pictures in which meaning was constantly in flux. They were stories people told themselves.

If she loved him the way she said she did, she wanted him whole. Maybe this was what love meant after all: sacrifice and selflessness. It did not mean hearts and flowers and a happy ending, but the knowledge that another's well-being is more important than one's own.

Love. It's so close to hate, it's almost indistinguishable. But this is how it was for the two of them. Love and hate. Life and death. Joy and anguish.