“Lexie Madison developed out of nothing like a Polaroid, she curled off the page and hung in the air like incense smoke, a girl with my face and a life from a half-forgotten dream.”

“Voices tossed up and down the long flights of stairs, sourceless and intertwining like crickets' chorus, gentle as fingers on my hair. Night, they said, good night, sleep well. Welcome back, Lexie. Yes, welcome back. Good night. Sweet dreams.”

“My friend Emma, who likes things to add up neatly, claims that this is because my parents died when I was too young to take it in: they were there one day and gone the next, crashing through that fence so hard and fast they left it splintered for good. When I was Lexie Madison for eight months she turned into a real person to me, a sister I lost or left behind on the way; a shadow somewhere inside me, like the shadows of vanishing twins that show up on people's X-rays once in a blue moon. Even before she came back to find me I knew I owed her something, for being the one who lived.”

“The front door opened smoothly to my key, the air inside stirred as I came in and it didn't feel over-intimate anymore; it felt like a slight smile and a cool brief touch on the cheek, like a welcome.”

“Lexie's baby. Four weeks . . .not quite a quarter of an inch: a tiny gemstone, a single spark of color slipping between your fingers and through the cracks and gone. A heart the size of a fleck of glitter and vibrating like a hummingbird, seeded with a billion things that would never happen now.”

“This is the one thing I hope: that she never stopped. I hope when her body couldn't run any farther she left it behind like everything else that tried to hold her down, she floored the pedal and she went like wildfire, streamed down night freeways with both hands off the wheel and her head back screaming to the sky like a lynx, white lines and green lights whipping away into the dark, her tires inches off the ground and freedom crashing up her spine.”

“I know that small-town silence, I'd run into it before, intangible as smoke and solid as stone. We honed it on the British for centuries and it's ingrained, the instinct for a place to close up like a fist when the police come knocking. Sometimes it means nothing more than that; but it's a powerful thing, that silence, dark and tricky and lawless. It still hides bones buried somewhere in the hills, arsenals cached in pigsties. The British underestimated it, fell for the practiced half-witted looks, but I knew and Sam knew: it's dangerous.”