“Fate must hate her. He was far too good-looking to be someone she had just crashed into.”

“He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning...”

“The bottom had arrived. She crashed against it, but it brought no sense of closure or understanding. She just lay there at the bottom looking up. She knew there must be a very tiny circle of light up there somewhere, but just now she couldn’t see it.”

“For a moment something struggles inside her. Then her mind empties and she surrenders. Fighting fate is too difficult. She must save herself to fight whatever fate throws up.”

“If the clean man was not the boy’s father and if he had taken him, Tina knew that someone must be looking for him. She wanted someone to be looking for him.”

“She looked at him. He saw her tendrils of damp hair. He looked off, but he had never felt this thing so deep before, this need to speak, to say how far he had been swept from what is good, and the sense seemed doubtful and unmanly.”