“Between them was fifteen or so feet of frozen space, bounded by his window and hers, but it was as if the windows had liquefied, or else the air had, and his vision skewed and rippled and it was all he could do to put the Newport into gear and ease forward to let the next car in.”

“March, rain at the windows, and he had to be up at five the next morning. He listened to the click and patter of drops against the panes.”

“the air would get so heavy with moisture he imagined he could feel each bloated molecule as it toppled into his lungs.”

“A torrent of language, a spring off the near-infinite stream of confessions he had harbored half his life, all of hers.”

“Toward midnight he sat in the Raney Playground swings with his broken, disloyal heart continuing to pump behind his ribs. Maybe fifty feet away his daughter was in her bed, reeling, thinking it out, a thousand betrayals and loves and resentments riding the synapses between brain and heart and back again.”

“He could see tiny particles of dust drifting in the air between her ankles, each fleck tumbling individually in and out of the sunlight, and there was something intensely familiar in their arrangement.”

“The air between them seemed to accumulate energy.”