“But the cracks were splitting, finding power, thickening into chasms.”

“His thoughts skirted Sandy and especially Grace as if they were fatal chasms into which he might tumble.”

“Yet they spoke now across a glass-topped dining table as if words were just words, as if their histories were equivalent.”

“that a thousand choices were implicit in a single moment.”

“These were the beginnings of a new existence; Winkler could feel it gestating.”

“All the events of his life were compressing to singularity: one night, one hour.”

“But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. If he had learned anything it was the family was not so much what you were given as what you were able to maintain.”