But you couldn’t really start over. That was a huge, modern lie invented by talk-show hosts. Sure you could change things that improved your life, but all the bad stuff lingered. It lingered in your body compromising your organs.

There was no disguise for real love, she thought, and suddenly understood all that she did not have.

He wanted to dig a hole and put the past inside it and cover it back up again. He didn’t know if flowers would grow there or not. He hoped they would.

It was the simplest thing to do, loving someone, only it was the hardest thing, too, because it hurt.

You couldn’t teach kindness, she thought. It was something you were born with. People either had it or they didn’t.

Just the word beautiful was seductive – but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing – in the eye of the beholder – but that wasn’t really true anymore.

Let me tell you about love. Love is a kind of madness and you would follow it anywhere, you don’t care.

Whenever he was around, she'd get this look on her face, this kind of radiance. She was a beer poured too fast, her golden liquid spilling over the edge.

It was early still, the sky white, nude.

His life in general had been a neatly wrapped package of lies.