“I'm gonna kiss you in each room," he said. "Then it's dinnertime.""How many rooms to this place?" Ellie asked, her eyes wide.Miah shrugged. "I'm not counting.”

“And sometimes,' Anne said softly, 'there's just plain love, Ellie. no reason for it, no need to explain'Then she leaned back on the couch, crossed her ankle over her knee and grinned. 'Perfect love,' she said. 'And what's that like?''When you find it, lil sis. You'll know.”

“This is how the time moves - an hour here, a day somewhere, and then it's night and then it's morning. A clock ticking on a shelf. A small child running to school, a father coming home. Time moves over us and past us, and the feeling of lips pressed against lips fades into memory. A picture yellows at its edges. A phone rings in an empty room.”

“That's what makes best friends. It's not whether or not you live on the same block or go to the same school, but how you feel about each other in your hearts.”

“You have those walls up all around you...Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?”

“I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much...so, so much.”

“In our yearbook, there is a picture of me and Miah - sitting in Central Park - Miah has his lips poked out and is about to kiss me on my cheek. And I'm looking straight into the camera laughing. Two and half years have passed, and still, this is how I remember us. This is how I will always remember us. And I know when I look at that picture, when I think back to those few months with Miah, that I did not miss the moment.”