“She [Jo] recalled them holding one another and feeling a terrible numbness where caring should have been. She'd blamed it on the circumstances, the weight of what each of them carried that night, the responsibilities. But it wasn't that. They were holding something dying, maybe already dead, but they were too scared to admit it.She wondered why the tragedy at Burke's Landing hadn't brought them together. Adversity was supposed to do that, wasn't it? Instead, everything got worse. Cork wasn't just distant. Something in him seemed to have died along with the other deaths that drizzly morning. Nothing mattered.”

“The old poems said that lovers were made for each other. But that wasn't true for Kai and Elliot. They hadn't been made for each other at all—quite the opposite. But they'd grown together, the two of them, until they were like two trees from a single trunk, stronger together than either could have been alone.”

“There wasn't an in-between for me. I lived at extremes. And maybe I'd die at them too.”

“In her dream each of the people assembled around her looked like several others, whom she recognized, only they weren't gradually transformed from one into the other but each of them seemed to be inside the others simultaneously and one of them shone through another. And something else was inside them as well, something unexplainable which wasn't within any of them, whose sum total they appeared to be, and this was what fascinated her above all.”

“It was likely that no one had been surprised, however, as it was clear that Aline and McKenna belonged together. There was something invisible and yet irrefutable that made them a couple. Perhaps it was the way both of them stole quick glances at each other when one though the other wasn't looking... glances of wonder and hunger.”

“Was it just her, or did lovers look more adoringly at each other in this city? Especially in the springtime.'Die, bastards.'She sighed. It wasn't their fault that they were bastards who should die.”