He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others.

Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways.

It was not a life, if lived without love.

You got up, and you did something. And if trying to find a way when you don't even know you can get there isn't a small miracle; then I don't know what is.

The least planned part of the journey, however, was the journey itself.

... He went under the stars, and the tender light of the moon, when it hung like an eyelash and the tree trunks shone like bones. He walked through wind and weather, and beneath sun-bleached skies. It seemed to Harold that he had been waiting all his life to walk. He no longer knew how far he had come, but only that he was going forward. The pale Cotswold stone became the red brick of Warwickshire, and the land flattened into middle England. Harold reached his hand to his mouth to brush away a fly, and felt a beard growing in thick tufts. Queenie would live. He knew it.

He must have driven this way countless times, and yet he had no memory of the scenery. He must have been so caught up in the day's agenda, and arriving punctually at their destination, that the land beyond the car had been no more than a wash of one green, and a backdrop of one hill. Life was very different when you walked through it.