“It's impossible to know which parts of the woman, if any, were real.”

“This had been part of her training, part of her career, part of herself: whatever was going on, live like a normal person. Do normal things, see normal people. Don't give anyone a reason to question you, investigate you. Don't give them any meaningful answers to prying questions that might be asked after you've disappeared. Don't create any suspicion that you were not who you claimed to be.”

“But there’s this giant deception at the foundation of their relationship, their happiness. This impure motive. There was that small mistake that the woman made, uttering the wrong number. And then the man reconstructed an entire intrigue, a big thick plot— a seduction and affair and relationship and marriage proposal, a whole life— around her error and his notice of it. Taking advantage of her lie.But does that make their relationship less real? Does that make it impossible that they genuinely love each other?”

“It was impossible to understand how brief it is. It seemed like youth would last so long; it would last forever. But it's just a blink.”

“You go about your business, as far away from these lines as possible, pretending they're not there. So when you eventually find yourself at one of these lines, your toe inching over, it's not only shocking and horrifying, it's banal. Because you've always been aware the lines were there, where you were trying with all your might not to see them, knowing that sooner or later you would.”

“Kate was never going to understand the extent to which men were stupid.”

“She didn’t want to give the murder-pornography frame by frame. Didn’t want to recite her route across Manhattan, the length of the knife blade and the number of times she pulled the trigger, the color of the blood-splattered wallpaper in the hotel room, the man falling to the floor, the baby crying in the next room, the woman emerging and dropping the bottle, its nipple popping off and the milk spilling onto the carpet, the woman pleading “Por favor,” her hands up, shaking her head, asking— begging— for her life to be spared, her big black eyes wide, deep sinkholes of dark terror, while Kate trained the Glock on her, a seemingly eternal internal debate, while the baby sounded like he was the same age as Jake, late infancy, and this poor woman the same age as Kate, a different version of herself, an unlucky woman who didn’t deserve to die.”