“Parker: She believed, absolutely, that each person, each heart, had a counterpart—had a mate. A rightness. She’d always believed it, and understood that unshakable belief was a reason she was good at what she did.”

“She did know that the journey to happiness was laborious and strewn with seeds of suffering. She guessed that it was probably a place each person had to seek for herself, that each heart had to find on its own.”

“She had fooled herself into believing she was living the life she’d always dreamed of living when all she had been doing was hiding from it.”

“She had always been good at dreaming, but what she had never done before was believe a dream could actually come true. She believed now. The wonder of setting sail created possibilities she had never considered before.”

“She was terribly pleased, because she had always, secretly, deep within her heart, believed that she could fly. And now here she was, doing what she had long suspected she could do, and she could not deny that it was gratifying in the extreme.”

“Patrice had long since buried the particulars of events so painful that they caused her to resolve only to see good. With such a stance, such as dissociative split, she could walk with evil and believe it did not exist. She was Joe's perfect mate.”