“Here, in this house, her recollections glowed like embers on the hearth, and each night, in their warmth, she’d take a memory or two down from the shelf and dance with them for a while.”

“She deeply disliked being so fearful, but had actually grown rather comfortable over the years with disappointing herself. She used to try. Just leave the house by the front door once a day. Then, after a while, she’d try for once a week. Then once a month. Then, Why bother? she thought. Let the world come to me, and I’ll set out a little lunch. What she hated most was that she’d become one of them. Another Lichporter grown self-indulgent and eccentric, the subject of sidewalk gossip: Oh, her, Mrs. Bowe … yes, yes … so sad. She doesn’t leave the house, you know, unless there’s a you-know-what, not unless someone D-I-E-S.”

“Silas deliberately ignored that question, which he knew was as much for him as it was for Uncle. It was going to be one of those nights where she’d sink her teeth into a topic and keep chewing and chewing at it.”

“Here were love letters, the youth knew. Secret love letters. Unfound, still waiting somewhere beyond the mist. A young man’s words for this girl, maybe her words for him. Their private words for each other. Somewhere in the world, these letters sat hidden still, but might, at any moment, be found and read, calling her most cherished secrets from their hiding place back into the circle of the sun.”

“The more he thought about his mother, the more he could see that while they were on different roads, they were each just plain lost. In their life together as a family, maybe for the last ten years, maybe longer, they’d all been living in a kind of perpetual twilight. Not light. Not dark. Not anything. And then when his dad disappeared, the lights went out, and Silas and his mom had been wandering around in the dark looking for a switch. Could he blame her because she hadn’t found one either? Each of them had been looking for a way out of their own black midnights, and each of them still had a long way to go until they found some kind of dawn.”

“In life, a person will come and go from many homes. We may leave a house, a town, a room, but that does not mean those places leave us. Once entered, we never entirely depart the homes we make for ourselves in the world. They follow us, like shadows, until we come upon them again, waiting for us in the mist.”

“He had plans, but his hopes for higher education, like all his others, were built on “mights.” He might go hang out somewhere, with someone. He might get a job and earn some money. He might go to college, a really old school with gray stone buildings and an enormous library. He was thinking of applying next year. Maybe the year after. He wasn’t thinking about application deadlines. That sort of detail wasn’t a part of his plan. Not at the moment. And why tell his mother about this anyway? It would rekindle her expectations, and she’d only start riding him again. Better to let it be. When his dad came home, they’d sort it out together. His mother retreated into her world, Silas into his. What a family, his mother would say, but until now, Silas had never realized that they weren’t really much of one. The names of the days retreated from them both, and soon after the school term ended, Silas was no longer sure what day of the week it was. Every morning when he woke up, he missed his father more keenly than the night before, but the details and differences of each day blurred and eventually vanished. For Silas, the passage of time became a longing ache in his heart that grew daily worse.”