Look,” he said, “the point is there’s no way to be a hundred percent sure about anyone or anything. So you’re left with a choice. Either hope for the best, or just expect the worst.”If you expect the worst, you’re never disappointed,” I pointed out.Yeah, but who lives like that?

The choices you make now, the people you surround yourself with, they all have the potential to affect your life, even who you are, forever.

You can make your life, or life can make you. Was it really that simple of a choice?

Whenever you made a choice, especially one you'd been resisting, it always affected everything else, some in big ways, like a tremor beneath your feet, others in so tiny a shift you hardly noticed a change at all. But it was happening.

It's a choice, Annabel. And if you make the wrong one, you have only yourself to blame when there are consequences.

It's not forever', she'd said, but to my mother, it might as well have been. She had make her choice, and this was it, where she felt safe, in a world she could, for the most part, control.

But when you're alone in the world, really alone, you have no choice but to be open to suggestions.