But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.

Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.

During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.