“Gone had come to mean something different, in a way that is hadn’t used to. Something permanent.”

“But just because you bury something, that doesn’t mean it stops existing. Those feelings, they’d been there all along. All that time. I had to face it. He was part of my DNA. I had brown hair and I had freckles and I would always have Conrad in my heart.”

“And then I had a thought, clear as day. I would never be somebody's favorite again. I would never be a kid again, not in the same way. That was all over now. She was really gone.”

“I wondered if this was the way old crushes died, with a whimper, slowly, and then, just like that—gone.”

“In his eyes, there was no trace of what had happened earlier, and I could feel something inside me break. So that was that. We were finally, finally over.”

“It was like coming home after you'd been gone a long, long time. It held a million promises of summer and of what just might be.”

“There hadn’t been one specific moment. It was like gradualy waking up. You go from being asleep to the space between dreaming and awake and then into consciousness. It’s a slow process, but when you’re awake, there’s no mistaking it. There was no mistaking that it had been love.”