“This is the girl in the borrowed trench-coat, moving across the bridge with the river Seine underneath. She pulls something from the jacket's pocket and hits the button, not answering when the man without his coat catches up with her at that moment, calling her name.Pull back fifty metres, and here is the burning apartment, debris floating softly through the air that is filled with screams. Here is the man again, gripping the shoulders of the girl with his coat and yelling into her ears, 'What have you done?'And here is that playful smile that creeps upon her lips as she disappears, the air rushing to fill the space where she had just been.”

“Slowly, without taking his eyes from hers, the man in the black coat knelt before her. “I have come for the girl in the window,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears.”

“She tried not to slip her arms beneath his trench coat, or spread her palms across his broad, muscular back, or inhale the delicious scent of him, or rest her cheek against his hard, warm chest. She tried. And failed.”

“With what characters she had filled this lost stage of emptiness! It was here that she would see the people of her imagination, the fierce figures of her making, as they strolled from corner to corner, brooded like monsters or flew through the air like seraphs with burning wings, or danced, or fought, or laughed, or cried. This was her attic of make-believe, where she would watch her mind's companions advancing or retreating across the dusty floor.”

“She had just pulled her dress coat from it's hanger when Connor came bouncing out of her bedroom and down the hallway with something in his hand."Mommy, what's this jiggle stick?" She looked up to see her son standing not two feet away from Reece with her purple jelly vibrator in his hand. And he was shaking it, making it waggle back and forth.”

“At some point, Alice slipped one arm and then the other into the coat's sleeves, she buttoned its buttons, starting at the top. Silas had followed her, still not seeing what an emblem of defeat, shame, loss, hopelessness, the coat was. With such gaps in his understanding, he saw very clearly how the boy he'd been had grown up to be the man he was.”