Lie With Me, 2

    "For a long time I will return to this moment, a moment in which a young man approached me with a confident stride. I think of it as the perfect little crack in an extraordinarily brief window of opportunity.

    If I had not been abandoned by my friends, if he had failed to convince his to leave him behind, this moment would not have taken place. It could have almost never happened.

    I try to figure out the part that chance played, to assess the nature of the risk that led to the encounter, but I don't succeed. We are in the land of the unthinkable. (Later he will tell me that he waited for the right moment to approach me but until that morning it had never arisen.)

    In later years, I will often write about the unthinkable, the element of unpredictability that determines outcomes. And game-changing encounters, the unexpected juxtapositions that can shift the course of a life. 

    It starts there, in the winter of my seventeenth year." -  pgs. 25-26, Lie With Me: A Novel by Philippe Besson, translated from the french by Molly Ringwald. Such a moving, incredible book.