“All she had to do was stay where she was, go on as she was.But there was no Tatiana here. Tatiana remained with Alexander. Her arms were around him in LakeLadoga, where she lay down with him every night. Her arms were holding him bleeding out into the LakeLadoga ice. She could have let go of him then, could have given him to God; God was certainly callingfor him.But she didn’t.And because she didn’t, she was here in America, sitting on the ledge of the rest of her life. It certainlyfelt that way, that seminal moment where she knew that whatever her decision, her life would take eitherone course or it would take another.One way the path was plain and vivid.And the other was black and fraught with doubt”

“Sarah wondered what they—the ‘they’ who had taken her child; the ‘they’ or the ‘him’ or the ‘her’—were feeding him.Sometimes a fear dug at her until she acknowledged it: maybe they weren’t feeding him at all.Who would do that? Who would willingly starve a child? Who would hurt her baby? Who would take her baby? Who was this person and why were they allowed to exist?And what would I do to that person if I got the chance?There were days when she lay on the bed and concocted scenarios in her head. She would see herself finding Lockie. She was never really sure of the place. It would be a dark room in a dark house but the location wasn’t important. She would see herself rescuing her child, folding him in her arms and saying his name. Then she would see the person who had taken him.There was never a face, just a body with a blank head, but Sarah would see herself grow until she towered over the person and then she would hit and hit and hit until there was nothing left and all the time she would be screaming, ‘How dare you take my child? How dare you take him?’She had to find him. The desperate need to find him swirled around her body with everything she did. It ate into her soul and sometimes she had to hold on to the kitchen counter to stop herself running out into the road and screaming his name. She wanted to be looking for him all the time. She wanted to leave Sammy and Doug and just keep going until she got to the city and then she wanted to knock on every door across the whole of Sydney until she found her son. But maybe he wasn’t even in Sydney anymore. Maybe he wasn’t even in Australia. Where are you, Lockie? Where are you, where are you, where are you?”

“Normally this is where she would have told him to put his dick in the doorway, so she could slam the door shut on her way out”

“sex was where laurel knew she knew him, and talking was the way she called him to her.”

“She said nothing for a moment, unsure what exactly to say. She loved him with every breath she took. She would do anything for him. How could she word her affections? Moisture assembled in her eyes, and, to her surprise, a tear trickled down her cheek. There were many things she’d like to say, but she didn’t know how.”

“She cried then, letting the raw emotions overtake her. She cried for the loss of her youth that bled out on a bathroom floor many years ago. She cried for the fairytale shattered by an exploding gun. She cried for all of the things she could not tell him, the regret, the fear of a future marked by desperation for things she could never have. She cried for the babies she would never bear. She pleaded for God to take away her memories of him, but they came one by one, spilling into the forefront of her mind, vivid as the moment they had just happened. And she was seventeen all over again, lying beside him in his warm bed, and had just loved him, was drunk with the love he had poured into her.”