“I might have been a fuckup and a failure and a disappointment, but I wasn’t a liar. I did lie to Belly, though. Just that one time in that crappy motel. I did it to protect her. That’s what I kept telling myself. Still, if there was one moment in my life I could redo, one moment out of all the shitty moments, that was the one I’d pick. When I thought back to the look on her face—the way it just crumpled, how she’d sucked in her lips and wrinkled her nose to keep the hurt from showing—it killed me. God, if I could, I’d go back to that moment and say all the right things, I’d tell her I loved her, I’d make it so that she never look that way again.”

“I finally said it. The actual words, out loud, to her face. It was a relief, not carrying it around anymore, and it was a rush, actually telling her. I was in an elated sort of daze, on a high. She loved me. I didn’t need to hear her say it out loud, I knew it innately in the way she looked at me just then.Conrad Fisher”

“Do you like Cam?” the girl asked me casually. I wondered how she knew him—I thought he’d been a nobody just like me.“I barely even know him,” I told her, and her face relaxed. She was relieved. I recognized that look in her eyes—dreamy and hopeful. It must have been the way I looked when I used to talk about Conrad, used to try to think of ways to insert his name into conversation. It made me sad for her, for me.”

“I’d stayed away for two years. I had to. I knew I shouldn’t even be at the summer house, because being there, being near her, I would just want what I couldn’t have. It was dangerous. She was the one person I didn’t trust myself around. The day she showed up with Jere, I called my friend Danny to see if I could crash on his couch for a while, and he’d said yes. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t leave.”

“If I did something to hurt Frankie and she said that I was never getting near her heart again, I’d spent the rest of my life trying anyway. That’s the difference between you and me, Tom. I’d go back to the moment it all fell apart and I’d start there.”

“I stared at him. Did he really say that? Did he remember? The way he looked back at me, one eyebrow raised, I knew he did. And this time, I was the one to look away.Because I remembered. I remembered everything.”

“There are moments in every girl’s life that are bigger than we know at the time. When you look back, you say, that was one of those life-changing,fork-in-the-road moments and I didn’t even see it coming. I had no idea.”