“If I'd been burned alive because of bad grades, my parents would have killed me, especially my father, who meant well but was just a little too gung ho for my taste.”

“What would my life, have been like, if I hadn't been put up for adoption? Who would my parents have been then? Or my parent, my mother?”

“Weird it showed it me that when I've had so many other awful things happen directly to me," I said beginning to tick them off my fingers. "Elodie getting killed, having to kill Alice, escaping a burning building with the help of a ghost..." And then because both my parents looked so deflated I added, "Oh, and this really heinous pageboy haircut in the sixth grade.”

“All those years I'd kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I'd coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright and the outline had been too large...”

“Part of me wished that my birth family could have been there too, but it would have been too hard for my parents, and I didn't want that day spoiled with strained feelings. In an ideal world, both my families would have come together.”

“That was the end of Grogan... the man who killed my father, raped and murdered my sister, burned my ranch, shot my dog, and stole my Bible!”