Though Lexington is not a small town, it sometimes feels like one, with circles of acquaintance overlapping once, then again; the person you meet by chance at the library or the pool may turn out to be the best friend of your down-the-street neighbor. Maybe thats why people are so friendly here, so willing to be unhurried.

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.

No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.

She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.

Short on money, long on hope

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.

Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.