Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.

The city of Pittsburgh gleaming suddenly before her . . . so startling in its vastness and its beauty that she had gasped and slowed, afraid of losing control of the car

This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.

Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.

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.

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.

A moment might be a thousand different things.