When you've never gotten love from someone, you don't know what it might look like if it ever does appear. You look for it in everything: any bright light overhead could be a star.

She took the sun when it came and the rain the same way.

This is personal, she'd said. Real. This moment was too, even if you couldn't see it at first glance. It was fake on the outside, but so true within. You only had to look, really look to tell.

It was a basic plot in any number of her books: girl strikes out, makes good, finds love, gets revenge. In that order. The making good and striking out part I liked. The rest would just be bonus.

I always tried to imagine what it would be like to open your door to find something you had given up on. Maybe it had seen places you never had, been rerouted and passed through so many strange hands, but still somehow found its way back to you, all before the day even began.

It was so easy to disown what you couldn't recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling. The only person you can be sure to control, always, is yourself. Which is a lot to be sure of, but at the same time, not enough.

He wasn't what I'd thought he was; maybe he never had been. I wasn't what I'd thought I was, either.