“Suddenly his expression turned to alarm. He sprinted toward us. For a moment I had an absurd vision of myself on the cover of one of Gran’s old romance novels, where the damsel wilts into thearms of one half-dressed beefy guy while another stands by,casting her longing looks. Oh, the horrible choices a girl must make! I wished I’d had a moment to clean up. I was still covered in dried river muck, twine, and grass, like I’d been tarred and feathered. Then Anubis pushed past me and gripped Walt’s shoulders.Well…that was unexpected.”

“I’d never seen a guy in a kilt before but I had to admit I really liked it. My gaze traveled up his bare calves and over his back. His muscles flexed as he bent to arrange the twigs and limbs for the fire. The kilt covered his legs at one moment, then revealed them anew as he stood up…I suddenly remembered the saying that Scots don’t wear anything under their kilts and pushed back a crazy impulse to see for myself.”

“I might have been a fuckup and a failure and a disappointment, but I wasn’t a liar. I did lie to Belly, though. Just that one time in that crappy motel. I did it to protect her. That’s what I kept telling myself. Still, if there was one moment in my life I could redo, one moment out of all the shitty moments, that was the one I’d pick. When I thought back to the look on her face—the way it just crumpled, how she’d sucked in her lips and wrinkled her nose to keep the hurt from showing—it killed me. God, if I could, I’d go back to that moment and say all the right things, I’d tell her I loved her, I’d make it so that she never look that way again.”

“I was taking a nap in the theater one day while I ditched English, when I looked up and saw Jess on the stage. I had to pinch myself, because I figured either I was dreaming or else I’d died and gone to heaven—which given my history was probably not where I’d end up.”

“A faint rattling pulled me from sleep, which was a relief because I’d been caught in yet another nightmare. After what Rick, my now-former foster father, had done to me, one would think he’d be the one haunting my dreams. And he had something to do with it—he’d revived me the night I tried to kill myself. In the moments before he had, I was certain I’d been standing at the gates of hell, about to be sucked in. Unfortunately, when Rick revived me, I’d brought a piece of hell back with me. That was what I dreamed about. Every night. A dark, walled city. Wandering, lost, trapped. A voice whispering to me, You’re perfect. Come back.Stay.”

“The woman in whose body I had grown, in whose house I’d been raised was, in some vital ways, a stranger to me. I’d gone thirty years without ascribing her any more dimension than the paper dollies I’d played with as a girl with the pasted on smiles and the folding tab dresses.”