CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble.

Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.

I place my hands over her ears and tip her head back, and kiss her, and try to put my heart into hers, for safekeeping, in case I lose it again.

Love you..." Henry-" Always..." Oh God oh God-" World enough..." No!" And time..." Henry!

Clare seems so pleased with the idea of me as a pirate that she forgets that I am Stranger Danger.

I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense.

I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room