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

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

“Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere.”

“Together, the unlikeliest of penitents, silently, grafting words to air, they sent their prayers into the room.”

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

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

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