“She was crying now, quietly, inhaling so vehemently it was as if she were trying to suck the tears back into her eyes.”

“This is not real suffering, she tells herself. this is only a matter of reprogramming her picture of the future. Of understanding that the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary.”

“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.”

“Somwhere across town she was standing at a sink or walking into a closet, his name stowed somewhere in the pleated neurons of her brain, echoing up one dendrite in a billion: David, David.”

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

“She said being able to give life was not something anyone should take for granted.”

“Maybe the idea was that he could write so many letters, deliver so many envelopes back to Sandy, eventually he'd have sent all of himself, and could exist more there than he did here.”