closed my eyes and listened. It was like music I'd heard all my life, even more than "This Lullaby." All those keystrokes, all those letters, so many words. I brushed my fingers over the beads and watched as her image rippled, like it was on water, breaking apart gently and shimmering before becoming whole again.

I think the most important thing is just to write. It sounds so simple, but sometimes it's not. You can get so distracted - -by having to work other jobs, or what other people have to say about your writing - -but the one thing that really matters is that you just keep going, especially when you're working on a novel. It's so easy to get discouraged and give up.

Really, it had been stupid to expect anything anyway. A few late nights does not a habit, or a relationship, make.

Love is needing someone. Love is putting up with someone's bad qualities because they somehow complete you.

I understood now. This voice, the one that had been trying to get my attention all this time, calling out to me, begging me to hear it - it wasn't Will's. It was mine.

No relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater.

It wasn't until Kiffney-Brown, when I met Jason Talbot, that I really thought I might actually have one of those boyfriend kind of stories to tell the next time I got together with my old friends. Jason was smart, good-looking, and seriously on the rebound after his girlfriend at Jackson dumped him for, in his words, 'a juvenile delinquent welder with a tattoo'.