“They played, laughed, and teased until the moment she slid him inside of her. When his world stopped. Everything he'd ever known. Everything he'd ever been disappeared in that one moment.”

“He'd once known a man who said that life hinged on the moment, that everything changed in the blink of an eye. Tesseract knew the truth of that as well as anybody. It was in those moments that he struck, after all, snatching people's lives away. He'd always known that it was only a matter of time before one of those moment's worked against him.”

“Well, he was certainly desirable-as desirable as Sam, maybe. Sam-when had she ever thought of him as desirable? He'd laugh until he died if ever knew she thought of him like that.”

“Before he'd met Anna, he'd thought he'd known what love was, thought he'd understood about friendship, romance, all o fit, but he hadn't - not at all. Until he'd held Anna in his arms, until he'd let her see his soul, until he'd heard her cry gently when he made love to her for the first time, he'd known nothing.”

“Right now, even though he'd been dead for years, she wanted to collapse in her father's big arms and hear him tell her that everything would be all right. Do we ever outgrow that need?”

“She was everything he'd ever wanted, beauty and fire arching againsthis despoiling hands.”