“But I like labels,” she admitted. “They make everything so much clearer.” Her sister Bree always told her she liked things to be wrapped up too neatly, and that part of the point of life was its messiness, its refusal to be wrapped up. Brett always took the advice with a grain of salt—it was probably Bree’s excuse for a messy room, or for breaking up with boys she’d dated without actually telling them.”

“That's the problem with life. It rarely gives you neat decisions wrapped up in shiny paper with a bow on top. Most of the important decisions in life are messy.”

“We go on in her room, where we like to set. I get up in the big chair and she get up on me and smile, bounce a little. "Tell me bout the brown wrapping. And the present." She so excited, she squirming. She has to jump off my lap, squirm a little to get it out. Then she crawl back up. That's her favorite story cause when I tell it, she get two presents. I take the brown wrapping from my Piggly Wiggly grocery bag and wrap up a little something, like piece a candy, inside. Then I use the white paper from my Cole's Drug Store bag and wrap another one just like it. She take it real serious, the unwrapping, letting me tell the story bout how it ain't the color a the wrapping that count, it's what we is inside.”

“Aunt Anne's lips quirked up in a smile. "Life is not a neat equation to be solved," she said. "It's messy and wild and unpredictable. That's the heartbreak of it, but that's also the glory of it.”

“She was the most beautiful thing in my life and my mind had settled long ago that she always would be. I loved her so much I could barely wrap my mind around it. It was like the sun being the center of the universe, the planets all held captive around it, unable to break free of the pull and unable to sustain without its magnificence. She was my sun, the absolute center of my universe.”

“Maybe Laney's right. Maybe June did love me. But I'm far less certain that she knew I loved her. Did she realise how much I needed her around? It's not like I ever told her. I was too wrapped up in my own world to notice what was going on in hers. Even if she did know, it wasn't enough to count. It wasn't enough to make her stay. So really, what did it matter, in the end?The bottom line is, it's my fault. I didn't love her enough. I didn't do enough. I wasn't enough. There's no excuse. There is nothing that will ever make that okay.”