And even if Amina didn't yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for sure that the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all were a bunch of dicks.

Nobody likes these things life hands us. But part of becoming a man is understanding how to face them head on instead of running all the time. It's time you learned how to do that.

Somehow, all the talk about tenure and anthropology had given her visions of a thick-walled, libraried adobe, the kind of place that was covered with kilim rugs and fertility sculptures. The white stucco in front of her looked only slightly more substantial than a roadside weigh station.

Why do fathers look ungainly in their daughter's bedrooms? Like mythical beasts wandered in from the forest of another world?