“It seems like maybe we tried to sleep normally a long time ago, when Bentley was a puppy. But then he gradually moved from his little bed to the floor next to our bed. And then from the floor to the foot of the bed. And then from the foot to next to me. And now from next to me to between us, under the covers, with his head on a pillow next to ours.”

“When he reached his own room again, he found Khloe curled up on his bed, asleep. He stood over her, watching her sleep peacefully for a few moments before taking a deep breath and moving to the other side of the bed. He sat down on top of the covers next to her and watched the rise and fall of her chest as she slept. He withdrew a leather bond journal from the nightstand drawer and tried to push Hecate’s words from his mind.Khloe is yours to deal with.”

“She seems to be resuscitating me from far away as soon as I start to weaken. I close my eyes and see myself fleeing from the bed to the mattress on the floor, and from there to the couch, and the rug, and Melanie following me sleepily from one place to the next. I shout that I can’t fall asleep within the magnetic field of another body, and she mumbles, half asleep, “Come on, try a little longer.” And so for a few bleary-eyes, sleepwalking weeks—and as if having no knowledge of it the next morning—she gave me the nocturnal portion of a withdrawal treatment from the loneliness: one night we spent a whole hour together, the next night two hours, then a week of regression and crisis as I tried to adapt to the horrific idea of a shared blanket. Until suddenly, out of utter exhaustion, I discovered that our bodies had already reached an agreement—even mine, the illiterate one, must have caught on, because one night I woke up from a deep sleep and realized how beautifully we turned over together in bed, embraced.”

“I scooted over, patting the bed next to me. "No such luck. And now you get to watch forty straight hours of Easton Heights with me!" He turned on the first disk, shaking his head, then got onto the bed next to me. "Small price to pay for getting to hold your hand." I wasn't cold anymore.”

“(...) next year she would have another birthday, and if she just remembered to get into bed left foot first and to turn the pillow over before she went to sleep, who knows what might happen?”

“Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child. ”