“There were moments in life, Marion thought, when you reached back, baton in hand, feeling the runner behind you. Felt the clasp of their fingers resonating through the wood, the release of your hand, which then flew forward, empty, into the space ahead of you.”

“I'm going to write to you about the emptiness that was left when you took my boy away. I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind. I want you to feel that hole in your heart and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its sharp edges.”

“There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.”

“You can't reach your hand into the space of tomorrow!”

“Even now, I hoped he would take my hand, and when he didn't, I felt my empty hand as if it were missing a finger.”

“...But as for Gabriel Sullivan." Ren reach out his six-fingered hand toward me. I clasped it. Warmth flooded me. But something else. Certainty. Trust. Compassion. Courage. He pulled his hand back, smiled. "That is all I can tell you.”