“At twenty-eight I'd had a handful of beaux, but had only been in love once, and that had been awful enough to make me doubt men and myself for a good long while.”

“I'd had my share of rain. My mother's illness ... had weighed on me, but the years before had been heavy, too. I was only twenty eight.”

“But he had been in love once, that he knew. Once and only once, and a long time ago. And it had changed him forever. Perfect love did that to a person and this had been perfect.”

“By late August, I’m on my second sublet, and I’ve been working as a copywriter long enough to know I’m not good at it. I seem to be reliving the life I had when I was twenty-two, but I’m about to run twenty-eight, which feels like the opposite of twenty-two.”

“It had been so long since i'd let myself fall for anybody.”

“College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did not—intellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere between all that fear and dread, I'd realized that was the wrong reason to go to college. That the potential for those things had been inside of me all along, only I'd never realized because I hadn't believed myself strong enough to break free without an intermediary.”