All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind.

In those first few hours officially single again the world seems like it expands, suddenly bigger and more vast now that you have to get through it alone.

I wasn’t ready to think about the other yet: that it wasn’t that I wasn’t right for Macon, but that maybe he wasn’t right for me. There was a difference. Even for someone who things didn’t come easy for, someone like me.

One open, one closed. It was no wonder that the first image that came to mind when I thought of either of my sisters was a door. With Kirsten, it was the front one to our house, through which she was always coming in or out, usually in mid-sentence, a gaggle of friends trailing behind her. Whitney’s was the one to her bedroom, which she preferred to keep shut between her and the rest of us, always.

I find that the more I depend on real life, the less interesting the story is. It's much more common for me to take something that almost-happened, or I wish had happened, and then follow that possibility.

It's a choice, Annabel. And if you make the wrong one, you have only yourself to blame when there are consequences.

Wherever you will go, I will let you down, But this lullaby goes on.