Top Highlights

• Her eyelashes on his cheek, her thighs on his waist, the first consummation of this terrifying thing they’d done. Marriage meant forever.
• Even still, a third person, their marriage, had slid in.
• Beauty puts a fine point on grief, shoots bull’s-eye into the heart. Hamlin cried for the widow and her boy, not for massive Gawain, their native son.
• The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math. If one might die at any moment, one must live!
• Just so: at once the people rose, shrieking, gathering things up in their arms, rushing about. The cat was startled that they were startled, because she had smelled the rain long before she heard it. A