There are moments when mental overload can render words impossible.

There was no pretention here, no hidden meanings in the phrases they spoke, no elaborate plans designed to impress the other. Though it had always been easy to spend time with Mike, she suddenly realized that in the whirlwind of the past couple of weeks, she'd almost forgot how much she enjoyed it.

Even his highly emotional Italian mother didn't believe that true love could blossom overnight. Like his brothers and sisters-in-law, she wanted nothing more for him than to marry and start a family, but if he showed up at her doorstep and said that he'd met someone two days ago and knew she was the one for him, his mother would smack him with a broom, curse in Italian, and drag him to church, sure that he had some serious sins that needed confessing.

You are Hannah, a lover of life, a strength to those who shared in your friendships. You are a dream, a creator of happiness, an artist who has touched a thousand souls. You've led a full life and wanted for nothing, because your needs are spiritual and you have only to look inside you. You are kind and loyal, and you are able to see the beauty where others do not. You are a teacher of wonderful lessons, a dreamer of better things.

Before we met, I was as lost as a person could be and yet you saw something in me that somehow gave me direction again.

Being with him was like toast and butter from the very beginning.

For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook the thought away. I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination. Because however it had happened, I'd somehow ended up eating shrimp in a dingy downtown shack with a girl that I already knew I'd never forget.