“I told him I had once lost everything I had, too, and that I think that can be God’s way of building walls around us to force us to look up at Him.”

“Sometimes when I think of Jesper all I can see is his dark back on the way across the white sea to Hirsholmene. It gets smaller and smaller and I stand at the edge of the ice feeling empty. Why didn't he ask me to go with him? I have a will of my own but if he had asked, I wouldn't have hesitated. I always went with him. After all, I had to look after him and he had to look after me, and my father would be furious with us both. Staying there alone was meaningless.Sometimes I imagine he tells me everything, but I know that's not true. He never told me if he went all the way to Hirsholmene. I don't tell him everything either, but I feel he knows what I am thinking, and I know what HE thinks. I have taught myself to do that.And yet all the same I am not sure.”

“I wanted to tell him I loved him and I couldn't remember how we met. He had things he wanted to tell me too; I knew by the way his breath hung in the air before us. There were so many things inside us, and it comforted me to think of them there, curled up, content, for the time being, to be hidden”

“I was aware of the time slipping away so quickly and I was hideously afraid that I would never have another chance to be with him like this again- openly, the Walls between us gone for once. His words hinted at an end, and I recoiled from the idea. I couldn't waste one minute I had with him.”

“And you think that that's going to fix everything? That all of your problems are going to be solved because you gave him a serving of cherry pie?" She was looking at me like I had lost my mind. Perhaps I had.”

“The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend.”