“All around us, birds woke up the sky.”

“Somewhere, excitement waited for me like an uncut cake.”

“I didn't tell him that I'd put his awful stories in boxes and stacked them on a shelf at the back of my mind. I could hear a quieter version of them still, from their dark place, through all the ot...”

“Anyone who's ever gone from warm and bright to cold and dark knows how I felt.”

“But the wind always swept my words away like cloud shadows, as if it mattered more that I said them, than who heard them.”

“I slept so long and hard that when my mother woke me the next morning I was a stranger to myself.”

“With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.”

“Then Cassie told her story. The feeling was like gathering up everything she's ever done or felt or known up to that moment and tying it into a ball and pitching it with all her might as far away a...”

“Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of makin...”