“I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.”

“When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires”

“My chest feels full of glitter and helium, the way it used to when I was little and riding my father's shoulders at twilight, when I knew that if I held up my hands and spread my fingers like a net, I could catch the coming stars.”

“Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.”

“If you had grown up with me, this is one of the things I would have tried to teach you: Marry a man who loves you more than you love him. Because I have both now, and when it is the other way around, there is no spell in the world that can even out the balance.”

“I wound my arms around his neck and kissed him back, trying to capture this moment, to clasp it, so I could always remember what it felt like to hold him this way.”

“You saved me," I said. Nathaniel put his hands on either side of my face. "I had to," he said. "So you could save me back.”