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.

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

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

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

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

She saw herself moving through another life, an exotic, difficult, satisfying life.

You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.