Sometimes he was jealous of Sylvia and how easily she let go of the past. He’d been trying all his life to hold on to it, to make sense of it. Why?

How, when you curate the past, you change it. The story you tell becomes the story that’s told and everything untold is lost. It’s better than having no story at all, he supposes.

Why did people have to inflict one pain to stop another?

That was it. Their first fight. They were both so relieved when it ended that they failed to notice that it wasn’t resolved. There was no answer to the question of altruism. They could drop it, but it would not go away.

She will think: We disappear so many times before we do, finally, disappear.

She asked the mustached man what he did for work, realizing a half second later, with some dread, that this question was bound to bounce back at her.

It had happened with an ease she never suspected could bring success.

Abe was always noting this aspect of Syl. What he called her belief in a “true human loneliness.” He’d said it was why he loved her the way that he did. He wanted to inhabit that solitude at the core of her. But if he could, then it would be lost.

We never really know the right things to fear. She let this thought ring in her head for a moment.