“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 it was also something in Sandy herself, an unwillingness to allow anything more to upset the realm of her understanding.”

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

“The future waited for him to keep his appointment.”

“Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary. Winkler was still on an airplane, hurtling north, but he was also pushing farther back, sinking deeper into the overlaps, to the years before he even had a daughter, before he had even dreamed of the woman who would become his wife.”

“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.”

“had felt time settle over itself, imbricate and fix into place the vertigo of future aligning with the present.”