You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.

But she had felt since childhod that her life would n ot be ordinary. A moment would come- she would know it when she saw it- and everything would change.

Norah looked at her son’s tiny face, surprised, as always, by his name. he had not grown into it yet, he still wore it like a wrist band, something that might easily slip off and disappear. She had read about people – where? she could not remember this either – who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to be not yet of the earth, suspended still between two worlds.

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.

It's good to be in love.

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.

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