“Maybe now I really understood why Elizabeth had run from me all of these months, why she would never allow herself to believe. A love as intense as the one we shared, one that had not dimmed through years of betrayal but had only grown, was terrifying. We had the power to destroy, to devastate and ruin, to lay the other to waste. But I wasn’t running.”

“My best friend in all the world really did have a boyfriend and had never told me. My best friend was sharing me with someone else and I knew whatever she had been giving me was only what she had left over from him, the scraps, the tokens, the lies. I had fought for this friendship, worried over it, made sacrifices for it, measured myself against it, lost myself inside it, had little to show for it but this bewildered sense of betrayal. Now I knew that I had never been the one she loved, I was a convenient diversion, a practice run until the real thing came along to claim her.”

“Angelique, with both hands open, lying limply on her knees, was giving herself. And Felicien remembered the evening on which she had run barefoot through the grass, so adorable that he had pursued her, and whispered in her ear, "I love you". And he understood full well that only now had she replied, with the same cry, "I love you." And he understood full well that only now had she replied, with the same cry, "I love you", the eternal cry that had finally emerged from her wide-open heart. "I love you... Take me, carry me away, I am yours.”

“And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It's the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once.”

“And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unbreakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?”

“To say they had waited for months or even years to find each other again would not be accurate. Love runs on another time track. It can't be counted down and won't allow itself to be defined as terminable. For Reid and Lena, it could have been months, years or a lifetime because at that moment, it was as if no time had passed at all.”