“Your ideal possession candidate's a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she's romantically besotted.”

“A girl never forgets two things: the day she started her period for the first time, and the day she met the love of her life.”

“Finally, Elizabeth understood that she had been orphaned not once but twice when her mother passed away. She lost her father as surely as her mother on the day of her birth. All those years, she idealized the earl’s devotion to her mother’s memory and ignored the price she herself paid. She grew up a lonely child, envying a beloved spectral being and wishing someday for an undying, perfect love of her own in compensation.   Her next thought stunned her: she would never wish that childhood on any child of hers.”

“Plainly, she is quite besotted by him,... a girl, a young girl, and she is falling in love for the first time in her life. ...little Kitty Howard at a loss, stumbling in her speech, blushing like a rose, thinking of someone else and not herself is to see a girl become a woman.”

“She had the underwear of a thirteen-year-old, as well, he thought. He glanced back at her. But the shoes of a courtesan.”

“Prostitution was illegal in Kenya and was culturally a taboo. But what was a young orphaned girl with little education to do when she had to fend for three of her younger siblings? As she watched the waves hit the shores, she noticed a young handsome man staring at her from a distance.”