“He is a man, and he is afraid. This is not a good combination.”

“Terrible beautiful combination of happiness and pain.”

“He wanted to be angry, to scream and rail and feel honest-to-God outrage. But he wasn't that kind of man. His love for Mikaela was more than just an emotion; it was the sum total of who he was. This one thing he knew above everything else. He loved Mikaela too much. Which in its way was as bad as loving someone not enough.”

“For years he'd strived to make a difference in the world, and he'd worked like a dog to make that happen, and yet here he was, a man sitting on a dock with his children, and never had he felt more certain that his words mattered.”

“He was afraid that the secrets she'd kept would always be here, inside him, an ugly malignant thing lodged near enough to his heart to upset its rhythm, and though it could be removed, cut out, there would always be scars; bits and pieces of it would remain in his blood, making it wrong somehow, so that if he accidentally sliced his skin open, his blood would--for one heartbeat--flow as black as India ink before it remembered that it should be red.”

“Love meant always being a little afraid.”

“He liked whores. He always had.”