“Kate was beginning to put distance between her sense of betrayal, her anger, and Dexter’s behavior. She was beginning to take his side. Or at least beginning to be able to see things from it.”

“But Kate was wide awake, chased by the same demon that haunted her regularly, especially when she was trying to forget it.”

“Kate had always known that she herself was a strong woman. But it never occured to her that there were strong women everywhere, living mundane lives that didnt include carrying weapons amid desperate men on the fringes of third-world wars, but instead calmly taking injured children to hospitals, far from home. Far from their mothers, and fathers and siblings, from school chums and old collegues. In a place where they had no one to rely on except them-selves, for everything.”

“But when Kate returned home he was gone. Back to the video camera that had recorded her. Back to his unexplainable office. Back to his secret phone, his unfamiliar contacts, his fifty million stolen euros. Back to his other life.”

“It would make a lot more sense if she had imagined this whole thing, her whole life. Now would just be now, attached to some other, more straightforward past.”

“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.”

“So she forgave him. And instead she berated herself for her suspicion, for her snooping. For the things she promised herself she wouldn't do, the feelings she wouldn't have.”