Hello friends!

"I'm perfectly well aware that she likes me here on this couch, that it makes her feel safe. As long as she thinks I'm too ill to get up she can tell herself she has nothing to worry about. I'm beginning to realize just how much of a child she really is, how terrifyingly immature and vulnerable- even unstable. There's a fatal flaw running through her, like a hairline crack in a Ming dynasty vase, but that very imperfection makes me love her with even greater tenderness. I don't suppose for one moment that that boy is aware of the never-ending care she'll need. Whoever marries Christine is going to have to be prepared to play the father as well as the lover; if she lives to be eighty, she may never be more than a child at heart, a lost and frightened little girl bewildered by the demands of reality."

Phantom, Susan Kay