It is a lie that people who love each other must know everything about each other. Love must occasionally allow for a gap. - Gabrielle Zevin

But people — the ordinary, the decent and basically honest — couldn't get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming that allowed you to say one thing and mean, feel, even do, another.

For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn't mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song. The kind you hum without even knowing what it is or why you're humming it. The kind that you've always known.

Win walked over to me. He held out his palm. In the middle of it was a single black sequin from the dress Scarlet had lent me. "You lost this," he said.

I giggled, slightly embarrassed to be leaving bits of myself behind. "I'm shedding.