“But those words were only the middle of the story. There was a beginning here, too.”

“But it was too early to know: there were always more pages to go, more words to be written, before the story was over.”

“So many versions of just one memory, and yet none of them were right or wrong. Instead, they were all pieces. Only when fitted together, edge to edge, could they even begin to tell the whole story.”

“The worst part was that I had things I wanted to tell my mother, too many to count, but none of them would go down so easy. She'd been through too much, between my siters-I could not add to the weight. So instead, I did my best to balance it out, bit by bit, word by word, story by story, even if none of them were true.”

“It was like those songs I'd heard as a child, each so familiar, and all mine. When i got older and realized the words were sad, the stories tragic, it didn't make me love them any less. By then they were already part of me, woven into my conciousness & memory”

“So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.”

“There was no way to take the story back, folding it neatly into the place I'd keptit all this time. No matterwhat else happened, from here on out, I would always remember Wes, becausewith this telling, he'd become part of that story, of my story, too.”