She accepted it from then on. Books liked her. Books wanted to look after her.

But one thing she [Rachel] did believe in was love. She believed that you could smell it, that you could taste it, that it could change the entire course of your life.

To think, after all this time, after all the searching and all the waiting, after all the regret and the time she'd spent away, she came back to find that happiness was right where she's left it. On a football field in Mullaby, North Carolina. Waiting for her.

Everything had felt so precarious since her mother's death, like she was walking on a bridge made of paper.

Right now everyone is drinking bad wine made of sour grapes and hysteria. Let them drink it, and let them regret it in the morning.

Blank-slate friendships were thin and temperamental. She knew that. There was no history there to cement people together, for better or worse.

She looked like autumn, when leaves turned and fruit ripened.