"I am thirty years old and that is nothing. I know what this sounds like, and I hesitate to begin with something so obvious, but let me say it anyway, at the risk of sounding naive. And let it stand alongside this: six years ago, a man I knew vanished from his home in the mountains."
"Straightening, Mumma wiped her eyes and stood, told Agnes: Wait here, and returned with a bag of cloth-scraps. Inside Agnes recognized one of Lillian’s old rompers, a torn undershirt of their father’s. These go in there, her mother said, nodding first at the scraps and then toward the place from which blood flowed and had begun to tinge the bathwater."