“It wasn’t was easy as picking one over the other. Nothing ever was. It wasn’t as though I’d even had a choice, not really.”

“I went over and over everything that had ever happened between us. I couldn’t keep doing it, going back and fourth, holding her close and then pushing her away. It wasn’t right”

“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.”

“Taylor wanted me to forget about Conrad, to just erase him from my mind and memory. She kept saying things like, “everybody has to get over a first love, it’s a rite of passage.” But Conrad wasn’t just my first love. He wasn’t some rite of passage. He was so much more than that. He and Jeremiah and Susannah were my family. In my memory, the three of them would always be entwined, forever linked. There couldn’t be one without the others. If I forgot Conrad, if I evicted him from my heart, pretended like he was never there, it would be like doing those tings to Susannah. And that, I couldn’t do.”

“I knew that now—that love wasn’t something you could do away with, no matter how hard you tried.”

“It’s a known fact that in life, you can’t have everything. In my heart I knew I loved them both, as much as possible to love two people at the same time. Conrad and I were linked, we would always be linked. That wasn’t something I could do away with. I knew that now—that love wasn’t something you could erase, no matter how hard you tried.”

“Remember that summer you liked that girl who worked at theboardwalk? Angie?”“No,” he said, but I knew he was lying. “What about her?”“Did you ever hook up with her?”Conrad finally lifted his head up from the couch. “No,” he said.“I don’t believe you.”“I tried, once. But she socked me in the head and said she wasn’t that kind of girl.I think she was a Jehovah’s Witness or something.”