...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.

The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It's a kind of power, isn't it, knowing a secret? But lately I don't like it so much, knowing this. It's not really mine to know, is it?

Norah watched him, serious and utterly absorbed in his task, overcome by the simple fact of his existence.

He had handed his daughter to Caroline Gill and that act had led him here, years later, to this girl in motion of her own, this girl who had decided yes, a brief moment of release in the back of a car, in the room of a silent house, this girl who had stood up later, adjusting her clothes, with now knowledge of how that moment was already shaping her life.

A moment might be a thousand different things.

Once, this whole world had been hidden beneath a shallow sea.

There was something not quite right about her eagerness, an eerie kind of voyeurism in her need for bad news.