“She'd be one of those parents who left a kid behind at a rest stop, driving for miles before she noticed. We'd hear about her on the evening news.”

“And what about you-the rest of you-did you notice the scars you left behind? No. Probably not.”

“If they failed the project - when they failed the project - the book would give her one last excuse to see him. To tell him everything, she thought, letting her eyes slide closed. Everything she should have said already. She'd spit it all out, regardless of who was around to hear it. She'd tell him how she couldn't stop thinking about him, how she just wanted to be near him. She'd do the unspeakable. She'd let her hands slide inside his jacket and her arms slip around him.”

“Lily kept her smile. She knew a little something about loss and what it was all about in the end. She searched for her answers in those items left behind.”

“That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone.”

“One of pleasures of parenting, future reader: parent can positively influence kid, make moment kid will remember for rest of life, moment that alters his/her trajectory, opens up his/her heart + mind.”