I wanted to use an urban setting with a small-town feel for a story that took a character through her childhood into her adulthood, with a background in arson investigation, ... I chose Baltimore and its delightful Little Italy section and was able to depict that neighborhood feel, the family ties, and I hope a good story about why choices made define who we are and who we become.

Survivors lived with their mistakes.

When you wait all your life for something and then you find it, it's like a miracle. All the parts inside you that've been on hold, they open up and start beating. You were okay before, you were good. You had purpose and direction and everything was just fine. But now it's more. You can't explain what the more is, but you know, if you lose it, you'll never be able to fill those empty spaces in just the same way again. Not ever. That's terrifying. I'm afraid that what's inside me is just a trick. That I'll wake up tomorrow and what's beating in here will have stopped. It'll be quiet again. I won't feel this way. I won't feel the way I've waited all my life to feel.

I can stand you not loving me back. There's always hope that you will. But I don't know if I can stand not loving you. It would be like...like having something stolen from inside of me. I don't know if I can handle going back to the way I was.

Be yourself. Be true to that, to your heart. Patience. See what happens if you step back instead of bounding forward.

It was a mistake to think of houses, old houses, as being empty. They were filled with memories, with the faded echoes of voices. Drops of tears, drops of blood, the ring of laughter, the edge of tempers that had ebbed and flowed between the walls, into the walls, over the years.
Wasn't it, after all, a kind of life?
And there were houses, he knew it, that breathed. They carried in their wood and stone, their brick and mortar a kind of ego that was nearly, very nearly, human.

He was one of the many toads you have to go through to find the prince.