“and then he wanted to say he was sorry, but just that sometimes he felt understandable and sometimes he worried when they bickered and she went a while without saying she loved him, but he restrained himself.”

“He wasn’t perfect or anything. He wasn’t your fairy-tale Prince Charming or whatever. He tried to be like that sometimes, but I liked him best when that stuff fell away.”

“But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?" I nodded into his shirt."Gives you an idea how I feel about you," he said.My old man. He always knew just what to say.”

“I figured something out," he said aloud. "The future is unpredictable."Hassan said, "Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice.”

“Eventually, he found the bed too comfortable for his state of mind, so he lay down on his back, his legs sprawled across the carpet. He anagrammed "yrs forever" until he found one he liked: sorry fever. And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted do cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus. Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word - forever - and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage.It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he'd ever gotten. And he'd gotten plenty.”

“My old man. He always knew just what to say.”

“Of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him-inevitably. And that's what I'd felt as he reached for me: I'd felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.”