But that was the problem with having the answers. It was only after you gave them that you realized they sometimes weren't what people wanted to hear.

That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.

You couldn't just pick and choose at will when someone depended on you, or loved you. It wasn't like a light switch, easy to turn on or off. If you were in, you were in. Out, you were out.

There was no short answer to this; like so much else, it was a long story. But what really makes any story real is knowing someone will hear it. And understand.

But you don’t have to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.” “You don’t have to assume the worst about everyone, either. The world isn’t always out to get you.

My books are so tame!

We'd start slow, the way we always did, because the run, and the game, could go on for a while. Maybe even forever. That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Look, there. Now. Now. Now.