As her good friend Leah once said, she wasn’t mean; she was painfully accurate.

That’s one positive thing about texting; you can pause and consider your options, whereas in face-to-face conversation, a silence of three minutes would be weird.

The trivia, the reading, the book club... they were simply weapons of self-defense.

You had to STAY married in the brief pauses between BEING married and those pauses so often had to be rescheduled.

Nothing. The first thing you should always do is nothing.

Since when had my little kid turned into the Spanish Inquisition? Nobody expects that.

He looked at me thoughtfully, and smiled slowly, his green eyes warm. He smelled of the outdoors, he was so tall and broad shouldered and so... male... in this house of women he was shockingly different. All I could think of was how much I wanted to kiss him. I was clearly losing my mind.

Leaving her apartment every morning was the turning over of a giant hourglass, the mental energy she’d stored up overnight eroding grain by grain. She refueled during the day by grabbing moments of solitude and sometimes felt her life was a long-distance swim between islands of silence. She enjoyed people – she really did – she just needed to take them in homeopathic doses; a little of the poison was the cure.

It’s this occasional hit of success that makes for a real addict. The breakthrough was always imminent; there was always something about to happen. In the dim interstices between flashes of hope you make your life.

It didn’t matter what they weren’t; it only mattered who they were.