It's not forever', she'd said, but to my mother, it might as well have been. She had make her choice, and this was it, where she felt safe, in a world she could, for the most part, control.

It was like discovering that some part of you wasn't yours at all. And it made me wonder what else I couldn't claim.

It's the same thing,' I told her. 'What is?' 'Being afraid and being alive.' 'No,' she said slowly, and now it was as if she was speaking a language she knew at first I wouldn't understand, the very words, not to mention the concept, being foreign to me. 'Macy, no. It's not.

You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends.

People don't change. If anything, you get more set in your ways as you get older, not less

It was amazing how you could get so far from where you'd planned, and yet find it was exactly were you needed to be.

There was something striking about a single key. It was like a question waiting to be answered, a whole missing a half. Useless on its own, needing something else to be truly defined.