“it seemed a lifetime ago i'd lain in bed with Lena and felt her breath tickling my chin and held her while she slept, felt her heart beating through her skin to mine.it was a lifetime ago. everything was different.”

“Her heart fluttered. It had only been a few hours, but it felt like a lifetime since she saw him last. She seriously felt addicted to that boy.”

“I don’t remember waking up that Sunday morning —- perhaps I never slept. Iwas just sitting up in bed watching Sarah sleep. She’d slept naked in my bed but she hadn’t let me have sex with her. I didn’t care. I loved watching her sleep. The light was falling through my window, all over the blue sheets of my old bed, and onto her face. I lifted up the sheets and watched her breasts move with her breath. They seemed to be sleeping themselves. I hoped that she wouldn’t wake up. I laid the sheet back over her, right up to her chin. I looked up and out of my room.I thought, This must be what praying is like.”

“But all that was as automatic as her beating heart, as subconscious as breathing - what she felt above all was the fierce tingling certainty of being alive.”

“Rebecca tilted her face up to Jake and she felt his lips brushing lightly against hers. Then his lips were beside her ear, whispering, "A lifetime of happiness, Reb, I promise.”

“She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she'd realized those parts had left her and were not coming back.”