Annabel

But from the beginning, I knew that in a world where destiny was dead, I was destined, forever, to love him. Even though he didn’t—though he couldn’t—ever love me back.

That’s the easy thing about falling: There is only one choice after that.

That’s what time does: We stand stubbornly like rocks while it flows all around us, believing that we are immutable—and all the time we’re being carved, and shaped, and whittled away.

Love obeys no laws other than its own.

The first time I saw Rachel and Lena’s father I knew: knew I would marry him, knew I would fall in love with him. Knew he would never love me back, and I wouldn’t care.

But Lena . . . little darling Lena, with her tangle of dark hair and her flushed, chubby cheeks. She used to rescue spiders from the pavement to keep them from getting squashed; quiet, thoughtful Lena, with the sweetest lisp to break your heart. To break my heart: my wild, uncured, erratic, incomprehensible heart.

Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?

And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed?

I remember one time I turned and saw Conrad standing in the doorway. He stared at me, and in that moment the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn’t quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes—maybe a kind of understanding.