“What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?”

“Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother?Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.”

“You might have to lose control before you could find out what you'd been missing.”

“You stared at the stranger in front of you and decided,categorically, that this was no longer your son. Or you made the decision to find whatever scraps ofyour child you still could in what he had become.Was that even really a choice, if you were a mother?”

“Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry.”

“It reminded Lacy of running into someone you hadn't seen for a while, and finding her bald and missing her eyebrows: you knew she was in the throes of chemotherapy, but pretended you didn't, because it was easier that way for both of you.”

“Because we're two of a kind. You were made to take care of me, and I'm going to take care of you.”