And though I had misgiving--obvious ones, too--one overwhelming thing drove me on: on the borderlands, my father would need me as much as I'd need him. That's what made me so blindly ready to go off with him. What boy doesn't wait his whole childhood to walk alongside his father on equal terms?

There are so many similarities between [my father] and me, I can see that. But what I think really scares me are the countless ways I'm not like him. And because the past is getting farther and farther behind me, and the end coming closer and closer, I'm afraid I'll never meet the man in myself that I saw in him.

Every person, I have come to believe, has a moment or a place in life when all four points of the compass converge, from when or where their life finally takes--for better or for worse--its fated course.

And now it's been half a winter since Harry vanished, and I can finally rest my thoughts. I ought to feel relief. Of this I'm sure. But do you know what it's like to hold proof of the last heartache you'll ever know in your own raw hands? I hadn't known, either, not until Gus delivered Harry's red hat yesterday morning, a cork bobber sewed on where the pompom should've been.

When she asked what my father taught me, I told her I couldn't put it into words. But then I lay awake watching the snow fall outside and came up with this: how brave a thing it was for him to try to rediscover something, even if it was only himself, not a continent.

I thought how wise he was to lure his rival out into the woods, where every fight's fair.