“He was failing at everything important. A room away his daughter was sitting with her face in her hands and he could not go to her.”

“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 thought he might say more, but something in her face had closed off, and the opportunity passed.”

“He could not look at his daughter without feeling his heart turn over.”

“Her smile was genuine-looking and later he would mull her question over and over in his head until it mushroomed into something larger.”

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

“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.”