"He play with the string on my hoodie. Can't lie, I'm as scared as the first day I held him. Don't know if that feeling ever gon' go away. Forget the world; he should have the sun, the moon, and all the stars, and they wouldn't be enough."
Maverick's reaction to Seven saying "Da-Da" for the first time. Seven said it on Christmas, and Maverick describes it as the best gift he ever got.
When Adonis tells Mav, who has been told his whole life that if he isn't a gangbanger, he isn't a man, that it took nothing but a man to leave his gang behind:
"On some real shit, son? There's a lot of grown men in the game who don't want to be in it. They don't have the guts to admit it like you do. They too caught up or too scared of what people think. They end up accepting that they stuck."
For a second, it sound like he describing himself.
And right after, when he, the man whom Mav was trying to become the whole book, tells Mav that he's become his own person:
"For you to admit that you want out? It means you're thinking for yourself, like a man should," he says. "They oughta start calling you Big Mav instead of Li'l Don."
A Starr is born:
I look up at the night sky. It's pitch black, and yet that somehow makes the stars shine brighter. Hundreds of lights in all that darkness.
Wait a second.
A light in the darkness.
I smile, and I look at Lisa. "I think I got a name."
