“Silas was tired of living in a world where everyone and everything held its breath.”

“Uncle seemed to take pleasure from knowing things other people didn’t. Silas did not like thinking this about the man who’d given them a place to live, but there was a sort of smirk hidden inside his uncle’s words that made Silas feel like he was being laughed at. He knew that tone. He’d heard it often enough from kids at school, from the ones who’d look at you like you weren’t worth talking to, from the ones who looked at your unfashionable clothes, or the shape of your face, and told everyone else that you were a freak. Silas was scared of those kids, because usually, those were the ones who didn’t think that normal rules applied to them, the ones who thought they could get away with anything.”

“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.”

“Like him, Uncle had eccentric tastes and liked old things. The difference, Silas was beginning to see, was that Uncle saw such objects as extensions of himself, of his body, essential, required, uniquely his. This thought made Silas uneasy.”

“You understand too little of what you see. You see a pretty face and hear a loving voice. But she is more than that, Silas. Much more. She is cold water and lack of breath. She is emptiness and oblivion. She is the very tide, drawing things to her and pulling them below.”

“It was a stalemate Silas was willing to live with, and apparently, so was his mother. They both knew it wasn’t about the hem on a pair of pants. One of them was mourning, the other was not, and their individual reactions to Amos’s disappearance created a powerful tension. The air in the house was charged with it.”

“She knew what Silas wanted. He wanted her to believe Amos was alive somewhere. Silas wanted help, clinging to his hope. She knew her son. For all her dislike of how much he was like his father, she knew him.”