Sometimes when we find love we pretend it away, or ignore it, or tell ourselves we're imagining it. Because it's the most painful kind of hope there is. By indifference . By death.

But hope rises like water trapped by a dam, higher and higher, in increments that mean nothing until you face the flood.

What is she to you anyway?"

"Here's my answer captain. She's the thing that made this all okay-the threadbare coats and the old boots and the guns that jams when you most need them to fire, the loneliness of knowing that you don't matter, that you will never matter, the fact that you're just another body, another uniform to be sent into the fold or the frost, another good boy who knows his place, who does his job, who doesn't ask questions, who will lie down and die and be forgotten. What is she? She's everything, you dumb son of a bitch.

She'd hurt him, but she'd attempted everything in her power to make things right. She'd shown him in a thousand ways that she was honorable and strong and generous and very human, maybe even more vividly human than anyone he'd ever known.

A thousand desperate wishes have been spoken on these shores, and in the end they were all the same: Make me someone new.

The world was made of miracles, unexpected earthquakes, storms that came from nowhere and might reshape a continent.