“ Do you trust him? When had we reached the point where the answer to Rei's question had become yes without hesitation? When Zane had sat by my bedside for hours while I was drifting in and out of consciousness? When he had arranged for me to be visited by entertainers and friends, or had carried me home when I was too tired to walk? Or when I had first seen him cry and had wanted nothing but to comfort him? I do not know how, yet somehow, impossibly, we are here. ”

“And what do we do when we reach the cover of the trees?" He asked, wanting to roar at the top of his lungs how hopeless this was, yet he reigned himself in and remembered how the child had impressed him when they’d first met."We wait." She answered simply and smiled at him again.”

“When I asked him for some explanation as to why he wanted to kill me, he said it was because he didn't like his jobs. When I asked him since when had he not liked his jobs, he said since always. When I remarked that he had never told me this, and that I had gotten the impression that he had liked them, he said: "How is that possible? You know me. Do I strike you as stupid or boring?""No.""Then how could you think I would enjoy being an etiquette expert, or a Weight Watchers' counselor, or a stripper? How could you think that someone like me, with my mind, my character, would derive any satisfaction from those things?”

“We labored under the pretense that nothing had changed when everything had, and I understood him, but i no longer knew him.”

“We were equals afterwards, as we had been before; but, afterwards at quiet times when I sat looking at Joe and thinking about him, I had a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my heart.”

“As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited, despite my incantation. When I did, I wished for my waking life, the hours when I didn't see the nightmare images of all that had happened and all I had become.”