Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.

That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him.

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.

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.

After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?

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.

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