“I will admit it sometimes felt strange to me to make the confession to someone and later catch them laughing, or flirting, or eating a sandwich, instead of tearing at the injustice of it all or sitting quietly at the center of a grand and monstrous grief. The disaster of my life might be only the worst thing another person heard that afternoon; they might have forgotten by dinnertime; they might have been more heartbroken by watching certain movies.”

“I am heartbroken, but I have been heartbroken before, and this might be the best for which I can hope.”

“I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.”

“Sometimes I felt like the mundane details of our lives were the only things tethering me to the world. I could hold onto them - distractions necessitating action. They gave me a sense of purpose. If not for the leaky faucet, the sandwiches, the bills, I might not know what to do with my hands.”

“How strange to have a sister, Valarie thought. Someone you might have been.”

“Watching her talk to someone else made me crazy. I was jealous. Ridiculous. I wanted her to know me; I wanted her to talk to me. And I felt it then: this strange, inexplicable sense that she might be the only person in the world I could really care about.”