She'd slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but she'd been plagued with strange dreams, the sort that lingered upon waking but slithered away from memory as she tried to grasp them. Only the tendrils of discomfort remained.

It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?

Hope's one thing, expectation's quite another.

Oh, there was harm indeed for a young lady flattered by the brief attentions of a handsome man.

She felt like a fictional character who'd escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free.

Cassandra's grandmother smiled then, only it wasn't a happy smile. Cassandra thought she knew how it felt to smile like that. She often did so herself when her mother promised her something she really wanted but knew might not happen.

... people who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.