Seriously, a thirty-something woman shouldn't be daydreaming about a fictional character in a two-hundred-year-old world to the point where it interfered with her very real and much more important life and relationships. Of course she shouldn't.

But the hoping, that's what really hurts.

I know they are naught things, but I devour novels.” (p. 57).

He looked at her, and the clarity of his dark eyes struck her heart with a sensation of a wound touched.

She touched the healthy folds of skin around the baby's neck, wrists, and thighs, the dark lines crying for life made in his forehead, and thought how people start with wrinkles and end with wrinkles, grow into their skin and then live to grow out of it again.

He nodded. "And if I don't make you feel like the most beautiful woman in the world every day of your life, then I don't deserve to be near you.

Here's the thing about home: you can create it most anywhere, as long as you gather your people around you.