“Life's so simple, thought Jill, if only you can strike the right note. All it needed was a little give-and-take. She'd often said so.”

“Jack and Jill slept, wrapped in each other's arms, untroubled by any dream in their cocoon of freshly discovered wrinkly passion.”

“Life's too short to be sat at home writing all the time.”

“She had six months at most left to live. She had cancer, she hissed. A filthy growth eating her insides away. There was an operation, she'd been told. They took half your stomach out and fitted you up with a plastic bag. Better a semicolon than a full stop, some might say.”

“He saw with sudden awful clarity that if he turned tail now and if, by some appalling miracle, she should survive, he'd never hear the end of it. She'd latch onto his flawed character and hold it up for relentless ridicule till the end of time, or thereabouts.”

“Off with the old and on with the new and never a second's thought between.”

“He was dazed, the soft thoughts sinking slowly in. A son. Even a daughter. His child. Immortality. A chance to make good. Pass on the hard lessons learned.”