First lines of the novel, “The World It Kills Softly,” which I won’t write today, as it’s Independence Day:

“She lost him on a Tuesday. Together, they had grown up sharing everything. They were Irish twins — born nearly exactly nine months apart. Together, they had perfected forgiveness. They had perfected dreaming, manufacturing lives intertwined, raising nieces and nephews as their own. They didn’t bicker; she couldn’t remember a single argument.

The Leukemia finally took him on that Tuesday night in April of her senior year, just a few short months after the diagnosis…”