“I was suddenly and completely inundated by it. What had been lost in losing him.”

“...maybe just once in this life someone loves us for the us we don't even know how to be yet. And if we lose him too early--in the name of all the promises in the world: a new job, a new city, an old love offering us happily ever after--we may just lose that chance to be our best self.”

“This wasn’t because he liked me, I was sure. It had more to do with him banking on what we of wedding age had all become witnesses to—how during these wedding weekends, single women, feeling a little lonely, maybe, or just feeling a little too far from being the bride, found themselves loosening their own rules, opting to be more flexible, more quickly.”

“Even now, after Nick had caused me pain, the truth was I didn't want to cause him any. Wasn't that love, after all?”

“Sometimes you don't know it. What you have been waiting your whole life for. You don't know until it is happening.”

“That's the brutality of a breakup, isn't it? The people leaving think they did everything possible, the people left behind think what is possible hasn't even been tested yet.”

“That was what I feared most: that he just wasn’t excited about us anymore—that something between us had altered irreversibly. And afterward, I started seeing the evidence everywhere: in the way he didn’t sleep facing me anymore, or the way he’d stopped asking me the questions he used to need to know the answers to, the way he stopped needing to tell me things in order for them to count.”