“People…ladies, I mean…they dye their hair sometimes,” I explained to him. “So one day they have red hair and another day they have brown hair. It doesn’t matter,” I said. “They’re still the same lady.”

“I said I was afraid and she told me to think about a time I felt brave and take that feeling into the situation with me. It worked. It helped.”Corinne leaned away from the Plexiglas, horrified.“Of course, since that time, I’ve learned much more about the technique,” her mother said. “I’ve learned to make it much more elegant, but the basics are still the same. Take that old calm, confident feeling with you into the new situation. I used it or a variant of it with clients all the time.” She knit her eyebrows, looking hard at Corinne. “I used it for evil during the kidnapping,” she said. “Now you can use it for good.”

“Now Sam and Noelle were dead and I was about to lost my grandpa, and I knew I would never have that everything's-right-in-my-world feeling again.”

“Maybe I had more wrinkles than I would if I hadn't spent so much of my life outdoors, but I didn't care. It was a privilege to grow old, and not everyone got to enjoy it. I was grateful for every minute I was given.”

“She felt happy these days, yet there was always an undercurrent of sadness just below the surface”

“It was so unlike her not to be able to sleep. No matter what was going on, she was usually out the second her head hit the pillow.”

“Sometimes it was hard to express how much you loved someone. You said the words, but you could never quite capture the depth of it. You could never quite hold someone tightly enough.”