“Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.”

“I loved him, you know,' she said. 'I would have loved him as hard as he'd let me, for the rest of my life.”

“He told me and Rafe to stay put in case you came home, burn the note and get hot water and disinfectant and bandages rea”

“How's Alison getting on?'Conway snorted. 'Tucked up in the sick room like she's dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. She's having a great old time.”

“The lines of her face, turned up to the sky, would have broken your heart.”

“That long sigh again, above us. This time I saw it, moving through the branches. Like the trees were listening; like they would've been sad about us, sad for us, only they'd heard it all so many thousand times before.”

“If you're good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.”

“I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.”

“and I wanted this girl who was like no girl I had ever known, wanted her not in spite of her moods and her secret bruises and her sad attempts at artifice but because of them, because of them all.”

“You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall.”

“If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn't forgive her for being hurt.”