Now as he watched Katie toying with a ring that wasn’t there, he felt his old investigative instincts kick in. There’d been a husband, he thought; her husband was the missing element. Either she was still married or she wasn’t, but he had an undeniable hunch that Katie was still afraid of him.
I suddenly understood that even love and caring weren’t always enough. They were the concrete bricks of our relationship, but unstable without the mortar of time spent together, time without the threat of imminent separation hanging over us.
I’ll think about you everyday. Part of me is scared that there’ll come a time when you don’t feel the same way, that you’ll somehow forget about what we shared, so this is what I want to do forever.
Then you came along and helped me believe in myself again.
When a person sets a thing in motion, there’s a feeling of unease, almost regret, until you learn the truth.
The memories of the day played in his mind, but this time, his thoughts were of his daughter and the way she’d clung to Katie, her little face buried in Katie’s neck. The last time he’d seen that, he reflected, was when Carly had been alive.
You need to learn patience, you grasshopper.
He was the kind of man everyone would fall in love with, even if they didn’t want to.
For desert, maybe we can split a couple of crumbs.
No drowning man can know which drop of water his last breath did stop;...
I cry to you, my Lord, my rock! Do not be deaf to me, for if you are silent, I shall go down to the pit like the rest. Hear my voice raised in petition as I cry to you for help, as I raise my hands, my Lord, toward your holy of holies.
So that’s the ghost you been running from.
I am not commanding you, but I want to test the sincerity of your love by comparing it to the earnestness of others.
That’s the thing about life, he knew. There was always a but.
The first thing I did when I sold my book was buy a new wedding ring for my wife and asked her to marry me all over again.
Denial is an ugly thing.
Had she been in town, the two of them would have spent most of the day together, and she didn’t want that. Then again, deep down, it was exactly what she wanted, leaving her more confused that she’d been in years.
But a risk-free life wasn’t much of a life, really, and if she was going to change, she might as well start now.
In another time and place, she might have felt differently, but thinking along those lines was pointless now.
More than anything, he wanted to return to the house with the same look of peace that he’d seen on Pastor Harris’s face, but he trudged through the sand, he couldn’t help feeling like an amateur, someone searching for God’s truths like a child searching for seashells.