“--that person who'd taken him apart and left a piece missing that none of us could find.”

“No amount of self-sufficiency could dispel the craving he still felt for that person we no longer talked about; that person who'd taken him apart and left a piece missing that none of us could find.”

“He missed you just as I did. He worried about you just as I worried. He looked for you. Tried to find you. Just as I did. But you were gone.” She took a step toward him. “You think he left you? It was you who left, Michael. You left us.” Her voice was shaking now, all the anger and sadness and fear she had felt in those months, those years after Michael had disappeared. “You left me.” She put her hands to his chest, pushing him with all her might, with all her anger. “And I missed you so much. I missed you so much. I still do, damn you.”

“It was left to Nancy and me to pick up the pieces that my brother had become; to resurrect his shrunken spirit and pull his pale tear-stained face from beneath his pillow and give sense to a world that had given him none; he loved, yet he wasn't loved back.”

“I'm already starting to miss him -- us-- and I don't even know his name.”

“After everything that happened, how could I miss him? But I did, I did.”

“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.”