“You cry, girl. You cry all you want, and when you're through and all this pain is nothing but a memory, I will find a way to make you smile. Do you hear me China Brown? That's a promise from me to you.”

“I didn't forget you. To this day, I have yet to walk through an airport without looking for your face, and every time it snows, I remember what it felt like to kiss you.”

“There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good . . .” His voice trailed off in the middle of the sentence.Laura found herself caught in the intensity of his gaze and muttered the end of the rhyme. “. . . She was very, very good, and when she was bad . . .”Gabriel finished what he had started, grinning at his own wit. “. . .She was better.”Laura’s eyebrows arched as she hid a quick smile. “That’s not the way I learned it.”Gabriel picked up his fork and dug back into his salsa-spiced eggs. “If you’d been a boy, you would have.”

“I'm a woman. We mature faster than men, remember?”

“As long as we draw breath, we owe it to the ones we loved and lost to live out our lives without wasting them on regrets.”

“Do you love me?" he asked.I fell silent."For the rest of it is glitter and noise," he said. "At the heart of it all is love. You make that choice, and you go forward from there.”

“I started thinking about life insurance and how nice it would be if you could get insurance that your life would be happy, and that everyone you knew could be happy, and they could all do what they really wanted to do, and they could all find the people they wanted to find.”