He asks me what happened to my leg. I told him I was shot by a shark. He doesn't react. Doesn't seem confused or amused or anything. Like getting shot by a shark is a perfectly natural thing in the aftermath of the arrival.

When I woke up in you, Cassie. I wasn't fully human until I saw myself in your eyes." And then there are real human tears in his real human eyes, and it's my turn to hold him while his heart breaks. My turn to see myself in his eyes.

So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.

You can’t force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it

I brought Sammy inside and put him to bed. Said his prayer with him. “‘Now I lay me down to sleep…’” To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.

He spreads his fingers over my heart, like he’s holding it, like it belongs to him, the hard-fought-for territory he’s won fair and square.

I do not mean to mock or ridicule your life's work, for in one way at least it mimics my own: We have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of phantoms. The difference is the nature of those phantoms. Mine exist between other men's ears; yours live solely between your own.