Like so many before them, they didn't care that my dad was only the messenger. They still wanted to shoot him.

And so we stood there in the kitchen, my mother and I, facing off over everything that had built up since June, when I was willing to hand myself over free and clear. Now I needed her to return it all to me, with the faith that I could make my own way.

Even if you do make tons of new friends,” I told him, “try not to forget where you came from, okay?

It's not always easy being her daughter.' I think,' she said, 'sometimes it's hard no matter whose daughter you are.

I didn't want to leave things the way we had, unresolved, ... and tried to tell myself he cared about me enough not to look elsewhere for what I wasn't giving him.

I remembered Owen telling me how music had saved him in Phoenix, that it drowned everything out, and it was the same for me now. As long as I had something to listen to, I could blur the things I didn't want to think about, if not block them out completely.

You need demarcation." "Demarcation?" I asked. "It means a clear separation between two things," he told me. "A solid end before a clean beginning. No murky borders. Clarity.