After you finish a book, the story still goes on in your mind. You can never change the beginning. But you can always change the end.

When you're a teenager, your friends are your life. When you grow up, friendships seem to get pushed further and further back, until it seems like a luxury, a frivolity, like a bubble bath.

Coffee, she'd discovered, was tied to all sorts of memories, different for each person. Sunday mornings, friendly get-togethers, a favorite grandfather long since gone, the AA meeting that saved their life. Coffee meant something to people. Most found their lives were miserable without it. Coffee was a lot like love that way. And because Rachel believed in love, she believed in coffee, too.

Every life needs a little space. It leaves room for good things to enter it.

It felt as though they were the only people in the world, two young women about to bury the symbol of their helplessness, as if that's all it would take to make them whole again.

She'd assumed she'd be married and have kids by this age, that she would be grooming her own daughter for this, as her friends were doing. She wanted it so much she would dream about it sometimes, and then she would wake up with the skin at her wrists and neck red from the scratchy lace of the wedding gown she'd dreamed of wearing. But she'd never felt anything for the men she'd dated, nothing beyond her own desperation. And her desire to marry wasn't strong enough, would never be strong enough, to allow her to marry a man she didn't love.

If a man has so much heat he burns your skin when he touches you, he's the devil. Run away