“It had been the most relaxed that either of them had been for as long as he could remember--certainly since their engagement. Rachel had spun and twittered for the first few days, disoriented without a wedding as the epicenter of her near future. But the pleasure of the postmortem and of being, finally, just the two of them, had aided her recovery. By the end of the first week she was almost convincing when she said brightly, 'I'm so glad it's all over and we get to get on with normal life!' She had repeated this assertion a lot since they'd arrived, but that had been the first time that she hadn't sounded crestfallen.”

“She had worked a year to get him out of her life as much as she possibly could. He always had a place in her heart since she had loved him so obsessively for such a long time, but she had been able to extract herself from him to an extent.”

“Something had broken inside her. No past or future, no sense of time, each day as endless as it was to a child. Linh had been right about her being a tourist of the war in the beginning, but with that detachment there had also been a kind of strength. As Darrow had said, there was a price to mastery. Now she was in limbo, neither an observer of the country, nor a part of it. For the first time since she was a child, she considered praying, but it seemed small and cowardly this late in the game.”

“At that moment a very good thing was happening to her. Four good things had happened to her, in fact, since she came to Misselthwaite Manor. She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for someone.”

“She felt Blake behind her, just where he’d been the first day they’d spoken. She wanted to tear out her heart and hand it to him, so he’d know she hadn’t meant to hurt him. But first she had to get them out of danger.”

“How long had it had been since she'd thought back on the evenings around the fire, number games at the kitchen table, or listening to her father sing? Too long. Yes, there had been bad times. And she had tallied them like figures in a column, not remembering to factor in the good. She had doctored the books.”