It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.

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

No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.

It wasn't right. He knew that, but it was like falling: once you started you couldn't stop until something stopped you.

After Memory Keepers Daughter, it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again.

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.

A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.