“The Ondřej feeling swept over him. The very thing he tried to explain to Sheila over the phone from France. The feeling that drove him to fly to Japan. You fall too fast, Brian Caleb. Please don’t be a pathetic idiot again. You be careful. His logical side screamed at him as he walked over to Jason and helped him down from the examination table.”

“He lunged for me, but stopped short of hitting me, instead taking hold of my arm and pulling me toward him. ‘If I ever see you again,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll finish what I started in there.’ He squeezed my arm harder, digging into me. ‘Maybe, for fun, I’ll just snap your neck in half.’ His pressed his lips to my ear. ‘And I’d better not find out you tried to contact Helena again, got it?”

“I always believed that for every good thing that happens in life, two tragedies rush in to kick your ass to keep you from getting all saccharine and deluded. It was as if just before you turned left into paradise, Ethel Merman popped up in your backseat and shouted, ‘Turn right, you idiot!”

“The little plastic figure swung back and forth against Marco’s hip, as if trying to keep up with him. No — not keeping up. They were clearly in lockstep. A perfect team. One always knew where the other one was.”

“She turned. ‘I’m quite serious, you know. I plan to murder him tonight.’ She touched my leg again; my muscles tensed. ‘I’ve got it all worked out. It’s a simply delightful plan.’ She cocked her head. ‘No, let me rephrase that. Really, it’s more delightfully simple.”

“Alicia, enough!’ We all froze. My dad had only invoked his Code Red Warning: You’ve Done It Now voice twice in my lifetime. The first was when Val was trying to feed me ‘magical pills’ from the medicine cabinet when I was four, and other was when my mom thought he was being too flirty with my aunt. ‘He’s twenty-fucking-two years old! If he doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t want to go, okay?”

“He's a drunken bum is what I'm talking about. And he might be a jailed one, too, if I report his hittin' me. Unless you want to add a little extra to the telephone money.”