“No chance she'd allow any man to see her naked besides the one who'd gotten her pregnant four times. You broke it, you bought it, baby.”

“The first time she'd gotten a short haircut-- paid for with her own money, thank you very much-- her mother had demanded to know if she was a lesbian.”

“Now I wish she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.”

“She was still loping around on all fours, her fists blue-white from the strain. As if she were holding a secret tight to the ground. Sister Maria de la Guardia would sigh every time she saw her. "Caramba!" She'd sit down with Mirabella and pry her fingers apart. "You see?" she'd say softly, again and again. "What are you holding on to? Nothing, little one. Nothing.”

“Beyond the immediate risks to her health and the health of her baby, when a woman chooses c-section, she decreases the chance that she will be able to get pregnant again and increases the chance that if she does get pregnant, the pregnancy will occur outside the uterus, a situation that never results in a live baby and is life-threatening to the woman. Furthermore, the risk of having an unexplained stillbirth doubles when a woman has had a previous c-section.”

“I can smell arousal, Talin. You get hot every time you see me half-naked."The erotic need that flared through her body was mortifying. Perhaps that explained the stupidity of her next words. "Maybe I get that way for every half-naked man.”