The silence in the house had smothered Ben for the past six months (...) On the days after the funeral when he had woken up in the morning in the old bed, he felt it resting on his upper lip, collecting in the dent below his nose during the confusion between sleep and waking.

Tiny secret blueprints of their parents were floating within her, growing, invisible and silent, engineering a soul. Every pregnant woman was carrying the dead.

His dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of a truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world to come -the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.

The room filled with black ink, deep and wondrous pools of dark liquid beauty that seeped into the spaces between her fingers and arms and lips. And the darkness between her tongue and the roof of her mouth was flooded with color and light.

She laughed, but did not promise. Instead she pressed her mouth to his, and he breathed her in, trust pouring back into his silent ribs, into the cage that held his heart