“She wasn’t sure if he wanted more from her or if he wanted less. Maybe it was both. Maybe it was always both.”

“But when he looked at her—and she looked at him—they both knew that there was something worse than kissing the wrong person. It was wanting to.”

“They never discussed it, but both came to understand it as a promise: he would always make sure there was a place for her. She would always be able to say, Someone is coming. I am not alone.”

“I've always been so apathetic. I figured okay, maybe the world is going to fall down around me. Now I feel… maybe that's motherhood, too. I want to make a better world, I want to make sure she has some place to walk around.”

“It was so weird, because usually I was totally nervous talking to guys. But Eli was different. He made me want to say more, not less. Which was maybe not a good thing.”

“Many people in the village wanted her to be more of a girl, and Peter had wanted her to be large and brave but a little less large and brave than him. But Pine Sap was sure enough to want her to be exactly who she was.”

“Maybe Liz was right and she'd wanted someplace safe. Maybe Mr. Solomon really did understand that running was the only way Macey would find out if we'd run after her. Or maybe, like me, she just wanted to disappear for a little while”

“He threw in the towel before we were tested. Maybe because he didn't want to be tested. Maybe because he assumed we would fail. Maybe because, at the time, he just didn't love me enough.”

“She’s not for you, nor you for her; at least, not in the way you both want.”

“Emily looked at him for a long time. There were so many things she wanted to know—but she wanted not to know them even more. She didn’t want any more answers. He had been the one thing she could trust, the one person she could rely on. She wanted to beg him to be that way again. But it wasn’t him who had changed. It was her. It was her own credulity she really wanted back. And credulity, like virtue, could be lost only once.”