The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.

Though Lexington is not a small town, it sometimes feels like one, with circles of acquaintance overlapping once, then again; the person you meet by chance at the library or the pool may turn out to be the best friend of your down-the-street neighbor. Maybe thats why people are so friendly here, so willing to be unhurried.

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

Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement.

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.

All that sunny afternoon, traveling north and east, Caroline believed absolutely in the future. And why not? For if the worst had already happened to them in the eyes of the world, then surely, surely, it was the worst that they left behind them now.

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