Here__ the deal. We go in, you stand there like the asshole you are, and I explain you aren__ gay lovers with the pharmacist. Sound good?_ Dove clicked her blinker on and checked her side mirror. __ll I heard was blah, blah, holding your dick later, blah, blah._ Duke rolled down his window and stuck his face into the night.

If there is one thing I can promise, that I can guarantee, it is not that I can protect my other allies from the same fate as Sage, it is not that I will not lose battles in the war, it is not that there will be times that will try my determination, it is this: I am the Pauraque__ rival. And I shall be the one to watch her fall.

It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.

Fear not, brothers and sisters, God, who is full of grace and abounding in steadfast love, meets us in our sin and transforms us for God's glory and the healing of God's world. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, your sins are forgiven, be now at peace.

Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.