She slips her arm around my shoulders and cradles my head against her breast.We breathe together. Slowly.Time passes, flowing, a long, less and less painful sigh. And I shut my eyes.Pain becomes only physical again.Fear recedes.Anger flickers for a moment longer, gas in the pipes after the stove has been turned off.She says, “I’ll take care of you.”And I feel gratitude and happiness rise up inside me: old friends, long-forgotten and yet much missed.

It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.

...Saeed's father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best friend.

There was also closeness, for the end of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things.

Suffice to say that theirs had been an unusual love, with such a degree of commingling of identities that when Chris died, erica felt she had lost herself; even now she did not know if she could be found p.104

But I must admit that my motives were no entirely noble; there were in me at least some elements of the anger and hurt vanity that characterize a spurned lover, and these unworthy sentiments helped me to keep my distance.

Mumtaz has six moles. Two are black: behind her ear and on her hip, in the trough of the wave that crests at her pelvis. Three are the color of rust: knuckle, corner of jaw, behind knee. And one is red, fiery, at the base of her spine, where a tail might grow. I touch them and know them because I watch her like a man in a field stares up at the stars, and I love her constellation because it contains her story and our story, and I wonder which mole is the beginning and which is the end.

'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.