My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.

His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.

In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.

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.

You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.

But she had felt since childhod that her life would n ot be ordinary. A moment would come- she would know it when she saw it- and everything would change.

Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.