“Her source of self respect was that she had not - as she put it - given up and crawled into safety somewhere. Into a safe marriage.”

“She was brave, wasn’t she? Look what she’d done. She hadn’t run back to the safety of San Francisco, but toward something dangerous and unknown. And Oscar had gone with her. He was it, the man she wanted to be with, and not just in sporadic or imagined trysts, Camille slowed her crawling as it dawned on her. She loved him. She loved Oscar Kildare. She loved him enough to give up everything she’d ever known.”

“She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever.”

“She wanted to die. She wanted to die. Because then it would be over. All the loss, all the grief, all the pain, the emptiness - over. And she had said nothing then. Nothing. Nor had she crawled into her room and swallowed her mother’s pills, or crawled into her bath and opened up her own wrists. As if death were somehow personal. As if death were somehow an enemy that could be faced and stared down, she would not give it the satisfaction of seeing how badly it had hurt her. Again.”

“When I met her, I saw her as someone else who needed saving but she had saved me. She had given me hope when I had given up on everything in my life.”

“To love someone was not what she had expected. It was like falling from somewhere high up and breaking in half, and only one person having the secret to the puzzle of putting her back together.”