“She was older, no longer the wicked limber girl with the stalled Vespa, but no less beautiful to me for that: whatever elliptical beauty Cassie possesses has always lain not in the vulnerable planes of color and texture but deeper, in the polished contours of her bones.”

“There has always been something enigmatic about Cassie. This is one of the things I like in her, and I like it all the more for being, paradoxically, a quality that isn't readily apparent, elusiveness brought to so high a level it becomes almost invisible. She gives the impression of being startlingly, almost childishly open--which is true, as far as it goes: what you see is in fact what you get. But what you don't get, what you barely glimpse: this is the side of Cassie that fascinated me always. Even after all this time I knew there were rooms inside her that she had never let me guess at, let alone enter. There were questions she wouldn't answer, topics she would discuss only in the abstract; try to pin her down and she would skim away laughing, as nimbly as a figure skater.”

“Sor-ry,” said Cassie, rolling her eyes and grinning at Damien. He grinned back, bonding away. I was taking a vague, unjustifiable dislike to Damien. I could see exactly why Hunt had assigned him to give the site tours—he was a PR dream, all blue eyes and diffidence—but I have never liked adorable, helpless men. I suppose it’s the same reaction Cassie has to those baby-voiced, easily impressed girls whom men always want to protect: a mixture of distaste, cynicism and envy.”

“Your irritation is important to us," Cassie droned, looking at me upside down with her head tipped backwards over her headrest, "and will be exacerbated in rotation. Thank you for holding.”

“Now it seems obvious, of course, that even a strong person has weak spots and that I had hit Cassie's full force, with all the precision of a jeweler fragmenting a stone along a flaw. She must have thought, sometimes, of her namesake, the votary branded with her god's most inventive and sadistic curse: to tell the truth, and never to be believed.”

“This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got.”

“You can't make a person, a human being with a first kiss and a sense of humor and a favorite sandwich, and then expect her to dissolve back into scribbled notes and whiskeyed coffee when she no longer suits your purposes. I think I always knew she would come back to find me, someday.”