“his discomfort seemed to soften her, for when he met her eyes again, they were kind.”

“He'd kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.”

“When he reached the desk he handed Caroline a photograph in a dark blue cardboard frame. It was a portrait, black and white, faintly tinted. The woman looking out wore a pale peach sweater. Her hair was gently waved, her eyes a deep shade of blue. Rupert Dean's wife, Emelda, dead now for twenty years. "She was te love of my life," he announced to Caroline, his voice so loud that people looked up.”

“There was something not quite right about her eagerness, an eerie kind of voyeurism in her need for bad news.”

“His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.”

“She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.”

“He could hardly imagine anymore what his life would be without the weight of his hidden knowledge. He'd come to think of it as a kind of penance. It was self-destructive, he could see that, but that was the way things were. People smoked, they jumped out of airplanes, they drank too much and got into their cars and drove without seat belts.”