It’s not a perfect situation. But when you have to choose between two bad options, you pick the one that saves the people you love and believe in most. You just do. Okay?

I am too strong to break so easily, and I become better, sharper, every time I touch him.

There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved for the sake of something greater.

I see a few hands stretching out to me at the edge of the net, so I grabbed the first one I could reach and pull myself across. I roll off, and would have fallen face-first onto a wood floor if he had not caught me. "He" is the young man attached to the hand I grabbed. He has a spare upper lip and a full lower lip. His eyes are so deep-set that his eyelashes touch the skin under his eyebrows, and they are dark blue, a dreaming, sleeping, waiting color.

Your daughter is doing well here. I've been overseeing her training." Since when does "overseeing" include throwing knives at me and scolding me at every opportunity?

When i get home, I sit on the front step and take deep breaths of the cool spring air for a few minutes. My mother was the one who taught me to steal moments like those, moments of freedom, though she didn't now it. I watched her... But I learned something else from watching her too, which is that the free moments always have to end.

I'm going to shoot a muffin off Marlene's head.