“I hugged her because she was proof that Luke had good taste in women and he had settled on me which said a lot about both of us.”

“Okay, Lucy, what did you want to talk to me about?" he asked."Us." "There is no us," Val reminded her firmly—although he had gotten misty just a moment before while holding her hand. She had given him both the best years of his life and the worst. "There used to be an us," she suggested, "which was a good us, a great us. Now there isn't an us, but that doesn't mean there can't be an us again. And a great us, not just a good us, because without us, I do okay and sometimes not even okay." Val's eyebrows wrinkled and he stared hard at her. "That didn't come out quite like I imagined," Lucy said. Romantic it certainly wasn't. "I meant to say, I'd like us to have a second chance.”

“She had spent days balancing on the edge of a choice. A choice, she had suddenly realized, that was never truly a matter of selection. It was what Damien had seemed to know from the start. The only choice she could make was to ignore the demands of her heart and her spirit, both of which she had tried to ignore no matter how loudly they had screamed at her. In truth, there was no choice. She was meant to be his, and he was meant to be hers. She had searched day after day for outside proof of this, only to realize that there was none, and never would be. The proof was stamped in the desires of her soul. It was the instinct that had been born in her, flipped on like a switch, the moment it had flipped on as brilliantly in him. Only he had seen the light, and she had been blinded by it.”

“She liked me because she said that we both hated everything and knew that friendship was an act of desperation. She said that for a man I was alright. She said that people were half-way and if it was up to her a lot of people would get killed and a lot of men would be walking around without their balls. She said that they should go on sale for women to hang off their rearview mirrors.”

“She said Robert Joyner had killed himself with a gun. And then I asked why, and then she told me that he was getting a divorce and was sad about it.''Lots of people get divorces and don't kill themselves,' I said.'I know,' she said, excitement in her voice. 'That's what I told her.”

“She told her journal about me passing by her in the parking lot, about how on that night I had touched her-literally, she felt it, reached out. What I had looked like then. How she dreamed about me. How she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow. How maybe if she was assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day. When she was imagining me, she felt better, less alone, more connected to something out there. To someone out there. She saw the corn field in her dreams, and a new world opening, a world where maybe she could find a foothold too. “You’re a really good poet Ruth,” she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydream of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me.”