“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.”

“I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about journey, maybe, but not the destination.”

“And I had no regrets about the way I turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not about the destination.”

“Not that I regretted having Annie; I'd never felt that way for a second. I just regretted that I'd never had a chance to live the life I'd thought I was supposed to.”

“It hurt, remembering. Hurt because there was so much I'd done, so much I'd yet to do. In so many different ways, I now realized, not remembering had been a blessing. A brief respite in the twisted bloody mess that my life had become.But at least I knew who I was.”

“Nothing is as bad as it seems,' I thought with the last remnants of my dense optimism. It couldn't be. I'd already lost everything once, I'd been ten, and so had countless other people I knew, and they all picked up and kept going. Or they picked up and went in a slightly different direction.”