“He rests his head against the mirror and exhales. In the years he was with Emma he sometimes wondered idly what it would be like if she weren't around; not in a morbid way, just pragmatically, speculatively, because don't all lovers do this? Wonder how he would be without her? Now the answer is in the mirror. Loss has endowed him stupid and banal. Without her he is without merit or virtue or purpose a shabby, lonely, middle aged drunk, poisoned with regret and shame.”

“She watched him, her head angled. He sometimes felt that she looked at him the way a cat regards a mouse. He just wondered how long it would take for her to pounce.”

“She was all he wanted. He would give everything for her. Without thought. Without regret.”

“She is gambling that he is good. There on the table, neither frozen nor yet moving, Lane Dean Jr. sees all this, and is moved with pity and with also something more, something without any name he knows, that is given to him to feel in the form of a question that never once in all the long week's thinking and division had even so much as occurred -- why is he so sure he doesn't love her? Why is one kind of love any different? What if he has no earthly idea what love is? What would even Jesus do? For it was just now he felt her two small strong hands on his, to turn him. What if he is just afraid, if the truth is no more than this, and if what to pray for is not even love but simple courage, to meet both her eyes as she says it and trust his heart?”

“And he, in his way, talked with her about everything, and shared with her everything, he thought would not be too painful for her, even though she was gladly willing to pay the pain levy, which was sometimes unbearable, only so that he would not for a moment stop the flow of his talk with her, so he would not filter or protect her or think twice.”

“I just figured out why someone would want to make the first mirror... I think some lover wanted his beloved to see how she appeared to him. He wanted her to be able to see herself the way that he did.”

“She was his. He would die for her. He would die without her.”