“Bad things happen whether you're scared or not, so you might as well not bother being scared. It's a waste of time.”

“I did the wrong thing, and I lost him for real.But did you do the wrong thing? Jamie thinks it was the wrong thing. But do you?No. I don't.I didn't do what Jamie would have wanted me to do, but that doesn't mean it was wrong.”

“The most acrobatic thing that goes on here is a synchronized hair flip.”

“He finds his way up the side of my neck, biting me just a little, moving lightly back and forth, like he's searching for a special spot. When he finds it, I make small sound I've never heard myself make before, like a gasp. He traces his tongue in slow circles around that spot. I realise my hands are just lying in my lap, doing nothing. I concentrate on lifting my arm and reaching for his face, but he catches my hand and holds it tightly at the wrist. His lips leave the spot and find their way back to my mouth, which is waiting, hoping for his return. He plants a gentle kiss on my lower lip and then whispers in my ear, "I just got lucky, Rose.”

“He was a bad thing waiting for a worse thing to happen.”

“That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.”

“i want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know.”