“I came here because it's pine-dark and the ocean is wild. The kind of quiet-noise you need when there's too much going on in your head. Like the water and the woods are doing all the feeling, and I can hang out, quiet as a headstone, in a between place. A blank I can bear.”

“I wish I believed him. He's looking at me like he can see where I begin.”

“Wren, come back, please come back. Don't disappear again. I want you here. Stay here.”

“So this is life. Love. We spend all this time reaching for each other and mostly we end up hurting each other until it's over.”

“All three are hip-deep in midlife, when the eyes go and the waistline spreads and the city on the hill that shone so brightly in youth turns out to be more like a semi-incorporated town in the middle of a garbage strike. An age when a person can feel not so much himself as an inexplicably inferior version of himself.”

“Larkin gets it, got it, the lies we live just to tread through time.”

“The real gift is time. Now. Each other, this night, and the wide, wide moon-silvered sea.”