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.

This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.

No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.

Your understanding of a place changes the longer you stay; you discover more, and your own life gets woven into the fabric of the community.

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

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

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.