This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.

He'd kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.

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.

This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.

It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

He had never even glimpsed her.