“The circus tent was flowing pale in the rain like a fleshy flower lit from within. It seemed to bloom in the downpour. Drops of rain caught on Rafe's eyelashes, blinding him as the circus light struck them. He groped for the flap, that slit in the fabric that would reveal her to him.She was on the rope again, her skirt flashing with tiny mirrors, hair braided with petals. He looked up at her, dizzy with it, seeing her face framed in the parasol. There were bluish shadows around her eyes.”

“She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.”

“Her skirts are long and don't seem to have straight hems, and her shirts are loose and hang over the skirts, so it's hard to see where one ends and the other begins. But with her children, she has clear control. They flow around her like her long skirts, flapping away and returning. Karen knows they will return to her side, like a magnet assured of its eternal attraction to tiny metal filings.”

“And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he'd felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire.Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light."See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.”

“There were tiny drops along the roots of her shining hair for the climb had been steep and now the shadow of disappointment darkened her eyes.”

“I looked back towards them, to see if they were watching me, and saw her pulling her arm from his grip. Her eyes were closed and her hair was all over the places and her face was screwed up.”