“I had found him again, and with him, my world had become completely unwound. It was messy and impulsive, naïve and irrational, and somehow, right again.”

“It was a completely new feeling for me–like someone had just released a million, tiny butterflies loose in my stomach, and they were feverishly flying up into my head and making me lose my mind.”

“A freshly red-painted train caboose had, for decades now, made its home on a green, little patch of the world outside of the one-room post office. Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.”

“You are my love of loves, my dream of dreams, my hope of hopes...and I would take the journey all over again because it led me to you, because it’s our story–the story of us.”

“Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.”

“The levee had always been my beach, the world beyond it, my ocean. That’s as close as it got here, anyway. No waves, no dolphins, no white sand, no sea gulls. If you were lucky enough, though, every once in a while you did get to see a crane, or a beaver.”

“His voice had this thick, Charleston accent, where every word had more syllables than ever intended, yet each word seemed as if it had been carefully chosen and presented in a way that only a man born and raised in the heart of the South could–distinguished and from a different time.”