“Riley found her friend studying the contents of one of the store's display windows. It was full of sparkle. “How do you catch this thing?” he asked.She dug in her bag, pulled out a sippy cup, and handed it to him.“You're joking, right?” he said. “You trap demons with cups that have dancing bears on them?”She glowered at him. “See the glitter in the bottom? Klepto-Fiends can't resist it.”He held up the sippy cup and compared it to the exquisitely cut diamonds in the store window.“Wanna bet?”And I brought him along why?”

“I didn't have a chance to buy you anything," she said, then held both closed hands toward him. Uncurled her fingers. In each cupped palm a brown egg. He took them. They were cold. He thought it a tender, wonderful thing to do. She had given him something, the eggs, after all, only a symbol, but they had come from her hands as a gift. To him. It didn't matter that he'd bought them himself at the supermarket the day before. He imagined she understood him, that she had to love him to know that it was the outstreched hands, the giving, that mattered.”

“She handed him his cup of tea...and he almost longed to ask her to do for him what he saw her compelled to do for her father, who took her little finger and thumb in his masculine hand, and made them serve as suar-tongs.”

“She was setting out china cups in their saucers, her long pale hands almost the same color as the cream china. "How do you take yours?""Four creams, two sugars," Riley said, still mesmerized by her.She stopped with a small waxed carton in her hand. "Really?""He's very young," Gabe said. "I take mine black.""He's very boring," Riley said. "Is that real cream?”

“I snatched up the cardboard cup, plastered my lips to the plastic sippy-lid and sucked down a scalding hot mouthful. It burned, but I didn’t give a damn. I held the cup to my chest as if it were my most special friend while feeling the instant affect the coffee had on my mood and I smiled. “Hello lover.”

“I wish he was mine," he said. The words slipped out without thought, but there was no taking them back..."I love Gus," she said, cutting him deep, deep. "Not only is he my husband, but he is honorable and noble and good, and I vowed before God that I would love him." She made a harsh tearing sound in her throat. "When I saw him that day, when he knocked me over with his bicycle, he was like something out of a dream, my dream." She looked at him, and her eyes glittered like shards of glass. "Oh, God, God, how could I have known, how could I have known? Up until that moment, you see, he was the closest thing I'd found to you.”