There was always the sense of a shadow looming just beyond the wall, the hum of a greater absence. - P11
They had managed to preserve their youth, while I had given in to the widening waistline, the boat shoes, the gray hair in my beard. - P6
I realized only then—I knew before I even inhaled, before I even pulled the smoke into my lungs, that it had been a mistake, that I had been wrong to do this, and that of course the cigarette—stale and dried out and shriveled from all that time alone—would taste nothing at all like I remembered. - P17
There would be the richness of our lives together now, the love and goodness multiplied by two, more bodies in the house, more laughter, more fun, but also, at the end of the day, less of us. - P15
How were we to know back then that all of that would change—that that would not be us forever, that after the first child the cigarettes would be gone forever, and after the second, the wine and late nights? - P15