“But growing up hadn’t been all cupcakes and parties, and he could remember wishing for a different life.”

“and there had been times when he wished he'd been born into a different family.”

“For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook the thought away. I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination. Because however it had happened, I'd somehow ended up eating shrimp in a dingy downtown shack with a girl that I already knew I'd never forget.”

“In profile, he could see both the young woman she was becoming and the little girl he remembered.”

“The stars were out in full, the crickets a little quieter. He had enjoyed talking to Allie and wondered what she'd thought about his life, hoping it would somehow make a difference, if it could.”

“and all I could think was that I would like to spend every morning for the rest of my life waking up beside her”

“She couldn't think of anyone else who remotely resembled him. He was complicated, almost contradictory in so many ways, yet simple, a strangely erotic combination. On the surface he was a country boy, home from war, and he probably saw himself in those terms. Yet there was so much more to him. Perhaps it was the poetry that made him different, or perhaps it was the values his father had instilled in him, growing up. Either way, he seemed to savor life more fully than others appeared to, and that was what had first attracted her to him.”