It’s like someone cracked me in half and found the rotten cancer in the deepest, most hidden part of my body. I don’t say anything back. I don’t look up. I watch as a tear falls from my face and lands right in my mug. And even though I was the one who cried it out, and I saw it fall, I have no idea what it means. I look up. “I think you’re probably

We move to tell each other what’s in our souls, to say what words can’t. We are touching each other in an attempt to listen.

I was wrong before, when I said there’s nothing more romantic than the end of a relationship. It is this. There is nothing more romantic than this. Holding the very person that you thought you lost, and knowing you’ll never lose them again. I don’t think that true love means your only love. I think true love means loving truly. Loving purely.

“I’m saying that I have spent the last three and a half years of my life hoping with everything I have in me to see you again. And if you think that you being engaged to someone else is going to stop me from putting our life back together, you’ve lost your goddamn mind.”

don’t think you’re trying to figure out if you love Sam more or Jesse more. I think you’re trying to figure out if you want to be the person you are with Jesse or you want to be the person you are with Sam.”

They say that when you remember something, you are really remembering the last time you remembered it. Each time you recollect a memory, you change it, ever so slightly, shading it with new information, new feelings. Over the past years without him, my memories of Jesse have become a copy of a copy of a copy. Without meaning to, I have highlighted

I don’t think I was ever afraid that loving both of them made me a bad person. I was afraid that loving Sam made me a bad person. I was afraid that I would pick Sam. That my heart would love Sam. That my soul would need Sam. You’re not supposed to forsake the man who journeyed home to you. You’re supposed to be Penelope. You’re supposed to knit the

Maybe, if you’re the kind of person who’s willing to give all of yourself, the kind of person who is willing to love with all of your heart even though you’ve experienced just how much it can hurt . . . maybe you get lots of true loves, then. Maybe that’s the gift you get for being brave.

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” Olive said when I mentioned it at lunch. “My brother just told me about this. You don’t notice something and then you learn the name for it and suddenly it’s everywhere.”