“Bryn ate her bagel in silence, and by the time she was finished, Liam had already neatly packed her overnight bag and loaded it in MacAllister's car. He even included a new dog bed for Mr. French to travel in confort. Lunch was in moducal little boxes."I think he is Alfred.""Actually, I often wonder if he's Batman.”

“He thinks about her, at this moment, in her house, a few thin walls away, packing her life into boxes and bags and he wonders what memories she is rediscovering, what thoughts are catching in her mouth like the dust blown from unused textbooks. He wonders if she has buried any traces of herself under her floorboards. He wonders what those traces would be if she had. And he wonders again why he thinks about her so much when he knows so little to think about.”

“She dug around in her bag, found what she was looking for, and brought the little stuffed dog back to bed with her. Childish, yeah. She didn't care. He was soft and cuddly-unlike Jones-and she had a need for soft and cuddly right now. She'd like to meet a woman who could breeze through a shotgun blast and not need something to hold on to. Even if it was just an old stuffed pup.(...)She swallowed hard,then caught her breath when he opened his eyes, turned his head on the pillow toward her. He searched her face in the dark."Come here," he whispered.When she hesitated, he reached for her. "The dog can come, too.”

“Bina rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, glances at the door. Then she comes over and drops her bag and plops down beside him. How many times, he wonders, can she have enough of him, already, and still have not quite enough?”

“I past another telkhine, who was so startled he dropped his Lil' Demons lunch box. I left him alive - partly because he had a cool lunch box...”

“Because of something she heard in school, Corrie asked her father what "sex sin" was while the two of them were riding on a train together. The father asked the little girl to carry his bag off the train. When she admitted that she could not do so, he said he would not be much of a father to expect this of her. The load was too heavy. This was the case, he said, with some knowledge. She needed to trust her father to give her knowledge at the right time.”