“It's fine. I hardly think about it now. It's long gone. Yet there is sometimes the shadow of a shadow, and when that happens I wonder if it could come back. And I don't know, because I don't know what caused it in the first place. My ohysche was turned inside out and shaken, but they never got to the bottom of why.”

“...when I came back, I found Mom sobbing at the kitchen table...Then I asked her what had happened.'Nothing,'she said. 'I was thinking about that man...I started thinking about...if he and his wife and their other child are okay, and I don't know. It just got to me.''I know,' I said, because I did know. Sometimes it's safer to cry about people you don't know than to think about people you really love.”

“It's not about you, okay? This time, it's about me. Not you. All my life, Lissa... all my life, it's been the same. They come first. I've lived my life for you. I've trained to be your shadow, but you know what? I want to come first. I need to take care of myself for once. I'm tired of looking out for everyone else and having to put aside what I want. Dimitri and I did that, and look what happened. He's gone. I will never hold him again. Now I owe it to him to do this. I'm sorry if it hurts you, but it's my choice!”

“I don't like the word soon because you don't know when it's going to sneak up on you and turn into NOW. Or maybe it'll be the kind of soon that never happens.”

“I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

“Now that I look back, I don't know why I was so stressed about it all this time. Funny how sometimes you worry a lot about something and it turns out to be nothing.”