“It's my turn to see you through,' she whispers, coming back to me and wrapping me in her blanket as I lose my shit all over again. She holds me until I recover my Y chromosome.”

“I do have a point to all this,” she continues. “There are like twenty people in that waiting room right now. Some of them are related to you. Some of them are not. But we’re all your family.” She stops now. Leans over me so that the wisps of her hair tickle my face. She kisses me on the forehead. “You still have a family,” she whispers.”

“There are like twenty people in that waiting room right now. Some of them are related to you. Some of them are not. But we're all your family.'"She stops now. Leans over me so that the wisps of her hair tickle my face. She kisses me on the forehead. 'You still have a family,' she whispers.”

“She looks at me, square in the eye. Taking aim. And then she pulls the trigger. “Because I hated you.”The wind, the noise, it all just goes quiet for a second, and I’m left with a dull ringing in my ear, like after a show, like after a heart monitor goes to flatline.“Hated me? Why?”“You made me stay.” She says it quietly, and it almost gets lost in the wind and the traffic and I’m not sure I heard her. But then she repeats it louder this time. “You made me stay!”And there it is. A hollow blown through my heart, confirming what some part of me has always known.She knows.”

“She left for Juilliard the day after Labor Day. I drove her to the airport. She kissed me good-bye. She told me that she loved me more than life itself. Then she stepped through security.She never came back.”

“So let's hear another one of your irrational fears. Mia grasped me by the arms and pulled herself in to my chest, like she was burrowing her body into mine. "I'm scared of losing you," she said in the faintest of voices." I pushed her away so I could see her face and kissed the top of her forehead. "I said 'irrational' fears. Because that's not gonna happen.”

“I look at her there in the shadows of the shut-down city, her hair falling onto her face, and I can see her trying to figure out if I’ve lost it. And I have to fight the urge to take her by the shoulders and slam her against a shuttered building until we feel the vibrations ringing through both of us. Because I suddenly want to hear her bones rattle. I want to feel the softness of her flesh give, to hear her gasp as my hip bone jams into her. I want to yank her head back until her neck is exposed. I want to rip my hands through her hair until her breath is labored. I want to make her cry and then lick up the tears. And then I want to take my mouth to hers, to devour her alive, to transmit all the things she can’t understand.”