Andrea Lochen

What good were fate and fortune anyway? If there was some sort of plan she was supposed to follow, it was unreadable to her and impossible to stick to. She was tired of fate, which was probably just a made-up concept invented by humans to feel like something or someone was guiding them anyway. God, spirits, cookies, whatever. She was so sick of buying into the idea that there was actually meaning behind any of this. It was just her, blind and alone, making a mess of her life on her own, thank you very much.

She loved him, and she was going to do everything she could to get him back. She hadn__ come this far just to walk away. He was the love of her life, dammit. The man she wanted to marry. The world had reversed its orbit to bring them back together, for Pete__ sake, and she wasn__ going down without a fight. Fate could only do so much; the rest was up to her.

What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone__ memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days.

It was a lesson she was still learning. When she had first started nursing, she had taken every death personally, like she was losing her father all over again. Every patient lost under her care was a little piece of death she would carry around with her until the end of her own life. But the alternative seemed so unfeeling. Tina and the other nurses could crack jokes and banter back and forth about contestants on American Idol before the body of a deceased patient was even cold. It was a coping mechanism, she knew, but not necessarily one she thought she would ever adopt. There had to be something in between. Olive had been called a bleeding heart before, but her heart no longer had the same plasticity and tenderness__t was scarred and worn beyond repair

Ah, selfish. There__ that word again._ Sherry smirked. __t__ been hurled at me many a time, because being a mother and wife is all about selflessness, see?_ She imitated a perky, syrupy-sweet voice. __iving up every molecule of your soul. If you want anything for yourself, you__e accused of being selfish. Marriage and especially motherhood mean being condemned to play second fiddle your entire life.

It__ not called __alling in love_ for no reason. It__ scary! It__ like jumping out of a plane with no parachute. Or bungee-jumping without your cord attached. Or hang-gliding with only one wing.

It__ easy to point out someone else__ mistake, harder to recognize your own. Especially because most people__xcept the lucky few like ourselves__re forced to live with their mistakes. So they learn to justify their mistakes, build on them, until they can look back and convince themselves that their mistake was inevitable all along, a good choice, in fact. An unwed teenage mother can look back at her unexpected pregnancy fondly six years down the road once the child__ out of her hair and in school all day. She wouldn__ dare go back and fix that mistake because it__ become part of her life.

I know a little something about fear, honey. I know what a relief it feels like to give into it at first. It__ not hard to persuade yourself that you__e doing the right thing__hat you__e making the smart, safe decision. But fear is insidious. It takes anything you__e willing to give it, the parts of your life you don__ mind cutting out, but when you__e not looking, it takes anything else it damn well pleases, too.

[A dog is] a bundle of pure love, gift-wrapped in fur.

It__ like I__ trying to keep the bad away with one hand while holding on to the good with the other, and it just doesn__ work. It__ stupid. I need both hands. So I guess I just have to spread out my arms and accept the bad with the good.

Love had still seemed like such a paltry thing in the face of all my doubts then, much the way it felt now. David had worries my love couldn__ touch, fears my love couldn__ easily dispel. My love seemed like a well-worn blanket instead of the titanium shield I needed.