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.

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.

Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.

It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.

Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.

Short on money, long on hope

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.