If anything ever happens between us, it happens because you actually want it to, freely, or it doesn’t happen at all.

I didn’t save you to earn you.” I had spent eight years with a man who taught me that every act of love was a transaction that put me in his debt.

And here was a man who had saved my life and my children’s, and wanted me to know, more than anything, that it had bought him nothing, and was never meant to.

That was the moment, I think, that I actually started to fall for him — not because he rescued me, but because he refused to let the rescue count.