They turned a distracted gaze on the world, wide-eyed, somehow, and questioning.

It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.

Your understanding of a place changes the longer you stay; you discover more, and your own life gets woven into the fabric of the community.

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

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?

He could hardly imagine anymore what his life would be without the weight of his hidden knowledge. He'd come to think of it as a kind of penance. It was self-destructive, he could see that, but that was the way things were. People smoked, they jumped out of airplanes, they drank too much and got into their cars and drove without seat belts.

He had never even glimpsed her.