“I love you enough to keep you from dying with me... ~ Dane de Falaise”

“Christopher, baby, I love you. Completely. I love your looks and everything else about you.” She felt his hand enclose around hers. “I know you do. Ashleigh…I love you so much that it scares me. Everything I do, I have you in mind.”

“Maybe you could drive yourself crazy trying to chart backward all the causes and effects, all the ends and means, tracing everything to some original sin that may or may not have actually occurred but that people accepted as true, or true enough. Maybe staring into the eyes of all that history was a dangerous thing to do, as her mother had calmly warned her. Maybe you were supposed to move forward armed with just enough history to help you figure out the present without obsessing over the past. But how much was enough? Where was the gray area between ignorance and obsession?”

“Christopher…you are the one that’s beautiful.” She lifted her head. “And not just on the inside. You’re beautiful on the outside, too. To me…you’re perfect.” She could see several emotions move across his face before his eyes half closed...“You say that to me…and if you’re not careful you might end up stuck with me.” It was a warning.”

“It would’ve been easier to die. It’s not that I want to be dead now. I don’t. I have a lot in my life that I get satisfaction from, that I love. But some days, especially in the beginning, it was so hard. And I couldn’t help but think that it would’ve been so much simpler to go with the rest of them. But you—you asked me to stay. You begged me to stay. You stood over me and you made a promise to me, as sacred as any vow.”

“He looked at her in complete devotion. “We made a little baby…”She smiled and giggled. “It wasn’t that hard either, was it?” “I don’t know about you but I was working pretty hard.”

“The right thing was confusing, and difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal, like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later.”