“Reed couldn’t have agreed more with his wolf. Tonight the three of them would spend the night in the same house. He just hoped they were together in the same bed when they did it. Preferably naked and sweaty with lots of intimate touching.”

“We did just leave an insane asylum,” Hi agreed. “For all we know, Chance spend his nights dancing naked with sock puppets, plotting to invade Canada.”

“When it was real it wasn’t funny. When you touched someone, they were always with you. When his mouth was on mine, we held the same breath in the same moment, and when he was naked, his body was covered in tiny black hairs that stuck to my clothes even after I washed them. He had sowly become a part of me and when he was cruel, or cold, or acted like we couldn’t go on like this anymore it felt like he was ripping my limbs off, one at a time.”

“Book-club night stopped abruptly when Caleb died. For almost a year and a half, as if by some type of tacit agreement, they all knew they couldn’t be in the same room at the same time. It was as if their collective grief would multiply, rebounding endlessly within any closed space like an image in a house of mirrors, until the pain would overcome them all.”

“Francesca couldn’t say anything, because that would just make her mother feel even worse, and soinstead they stood there as they always did, thinking the same thing but never speaking of it, wonderingwhich of them hurt more.”

“...if he sees his fellow humans as anything more than complicated animals. Not so different from a deer or a wolf, knitted together with the same sinew but in another design.”