“He’d tried to tell Aimi to do something once, and that hadn’t gone well at all. One thing he did know: when a woman got an idea into her head, there was no changing it.”

“If something upset her, she usually talked about it or cried and then got on the road to getting over it or changing it. … Kate had a tendency to bury her hurts deep inside and when they tried to rear their ugly heads, she effectively pushed them right back down. Kate gave the appearance of handling upsets well, when in actuality she did not handle them at all.”

“He hadn’t been her first lover or the first boy to give her an orgasm. He hadn’t even been the first she’d loved. He’d been the first to turn her inside out with something as simple as a smile. The first to make her doubt herself. He’d taken her deeper than anyone ever had, and yet she hadn’t drowned. ”

“With an utterly foreign sense of desperation, he did something that he’d never, in all his thirty-three years, thought he would do. He tripped her.”

“He spoke in hard and angry earnest, if a man ever did," replied the girl, shaking her head. "He is an earnest man when his hatred is up. I know many who do worse things; but I'd rather listen to them all a dozen times, than to that Monks once.”

“He hesitated, looking at her. The old Ellie was gone. Replaced by a woman who was detached and cold. He didn’t know what to say, how to reach her. There was a wall around her, and he’d laid the foundation for her to build it.”