Children don't heal as well.. they change.. they mutate with disaster and make accomodations.

Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.

I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough.

And she thought then how strange it was that disaster--the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face--could be at times, such a thing of beauty.

Love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.