If you're a bird... I'm a bird.

The first thing I did when I sold my book was buy a new wedding ring for my wife and asked her to marry me all over again.

She turned the key, never taking her eyes from him.

I love you, Katie. You might not be ready to say those words now, and maybe you'll never be able to say them, but that doesn't change how I feel about you.

He was thirty-one now, not too old, but old enough to be lonely. He hadn't dated since he'd been back here, hadn't met anyone who remotely interested him. It was his own fault, he knew. There was something that kept a distance between him and any woman who started to get close, something he wasn't sure he could change even if he tried. And sometimes in the moments right before sleep came, he wondered if he was destined to be alone forever.

She couldn’t read his expression. As he started toward her, she recalled the way he’d seemed to glide through the sand the first time she’d ever seen him; she remembered their kiss on the boat dock the night of his sister’s wedding. And she heard again the words she’d said to him on the day they’d said good-bye. She was besieged by a storm of conflicting emotions—desire, regret, longing, fear, grief, love. There was so much to say, yet what could they really begin to say in this awkward setting and with so much time already passed?

The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it.