“One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn't have a fireplace.”

“And a fire in the fireplace? Wow, that’s impressive.” I continued, walking backwards into the room.“Yeah, I saw it in a book about how to woo women… apparently you all like to be boinked in front of a roaring fire.”

“One thing was certain: he was my one. Most people go on their whole lives and never find their one, but I found mine. I found him when I was twelve-years-old.”

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice...”

“My father told his acquaintances about that for years, even though both Hannah and I had given up on wormholes and the Child Genius series very soon afterward. That must have made my father sad, as it had made him sad when we stopped being excited about family vacations, when we stopped being open about our interests, and left home and pursued lives of our own. It was just regular growing up, of course, the kind everyone does, but it still made him sad, I know, like the memory I have of the time he dropped me off at the train station when I was going back to Chicago. I could see him through the window of the train, but he couldn't see me through the tinted glass. From up in the train, he looked so small. If he'd seen me, he would have smiled and waved, but he didn't know I could see him, and the sadness on his face was exposed to me then. He looked lost. He stood there on the platform a long time, even after my train started pulling away, still trying to catch a glimpse of me waving back.”

“But he came, when I was at my darkest. I prayed him down from the sky, and he came in a flash of blue fire that lit up the heavens. I know he came by his own choice, but he came because I called him. He came when I could no longer take the weight of the world on my own. He came when I needed him the most. He came and saved me from myself, saved me from the waters that rose up to my chest and over my head.”