“He taught me there's a place on a man's back where, if you sink a blade in, you can pierce his heart and sever his spine, all at once,' Sebastian had said. 'I guess we got the same birthday present that year, big brother,' Jace thought. 'Didn't we?”

“I need Jace,” said Sebastian. “But in his heart, he’s not like me. But you are.”

“Basement?' Hamish cried, then glanced at his brother. 'You hear this fellow? He thinks we can just go on down to the furnace and start tinkering?'Angus laughed. 'He probably wouldn't care at all if the whole place went boom, he wouldn't.'At this the guard bristled and stood up even straighter. 'Now see here---''No, you see, my good man. Out here, see, we've got snow. So in there, I'd bet, you've got heat. And where there's heat there's gas; and where there's gas there's...'Angus trailed off while his brother said, 'boom.”

“Stella explained that when he had arrived, because of his English accent, she had assumed that he was me, and had asked where his fridge was. She didn't tell me what his reply was, and we can only hazard a guess, but I was impressed that he had been prepared to stay the night. It is surely a brave man who goes ahead and checks into an establishment where the first question is 'Where's your fridge?'. Especially if, as he had done, you had arrived by motorcycle.”

“It's like when my doctor told me the story of these two brothers whose dad was a bad alcoholic. One brother grew up to be a successful carpenter and never drank. The other brother ended up being a drinker as bad as his dad was. When they asked the first brother why he didn't drink, he said that after he saw what it did to his father, he could never bring himself to even try it. When they asked the other brother, he said that he guessed he learned how to drink on his father's knee. So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.”

“Maybe I will buy my nephew an aquarium for his next birthday. It’s got to be better than the bathroom sink, which is where my brother is keeping him now.”