“Obey the muse, Liz said. She's a fickle mistress.”

“If you stay, I'll do whatever you want. I'll quit the band, go with you to New York. But if you need me to go away, I'll do that, too. I was talking to Liz and she said maybe coming back to your old life would be too painful, that maybe it'd be easier for you to erase us. And that would suck, but I'd do it. I can lose you like that if I don't lose you today. I'll let you go. If you stay.”

“She said if she couldn't play, she had nothing left. What about me?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“She didn't care that people called her a bitch. 'It's just another word for feminist,' she told me with pride.”