“Do you want it bad enough to get over being hurt?”

“We all try. And try as we might to control things, sometimes bad things get in and it's not our fault.”

“I want to apologize to you, Nikki. Not just, ‘hey, sorry,’ but really. Apologize.” He paused, either to let her absorb it or to find his way, then he went on, “This is all still new to both of us. You and I came to each other with full lives, past baggage, careers, the works. Both of us. And this trip of mine, this was the first time since we got together that you’re seeing what my real work is like. I have the advantage of having gone on ride-along, so you—I get your life, inside and out. Me, I’m an investigative journalist. If I’m doing it right, I’m spending big stretches of time in places nobody else has the balls to go and under conditions most reporters wouldn’t put up with. That explains why I fell off the radar on my story. I told you I might before I left. But it’s no excuse for not calling you when I got in the clear. The only explanation I can give may sound flimsy, but it’s the truth. When I come off assignment, I have a routine. I sleep like the dead and write like the devil, in seclusion. It’s the way I’ve always done it. For years. But now—I realize something’s different now. I’m not the only one involved.“Now, if I could take back the past twenty-four hours, I would, but I can’t. What I can do, though, is say when I look at you now and see the hurt in you—the hurt I caused by being insensitive—I see pain I never want to bring to you again.” He let that sit there, then said, “Nikki, I apologize. I was wrong. And I am sorry.”

“Retaliation is not the answer. You're going to have to deal with mean backstabbing girls your whole life, you need to learn to be smart enough to rise above, okay?Did you kick her ass? Good girl!”

“Everything is fine, everything is just fine. It's ordinary. The problem is I don't want ordinary I want...""Magic?""Yeah, you know what the problem is, we just aren't in love, neither one of us wants to admit it.”

“Rejection isn't failure. Failure is giving up. Everybody gets rejected. It's how you handle it that determines where you'll end up.”

“Around 11 P.M., unable to concentrate on his work or even watch the news, he had started to wonder if this was how it started with stalkers. And then he started to think maybe he'd do his next article as an investigation of stalkers. But then he wondered... if you do a ride-along with a stalker, are you stalking the stalker?It all got very weird.”