Her family had shown her that love is a lie. It isn't stone-solid; instead it bends and crumbles away, weak as rusty metal.

The people we love are the ones who hurt us most, after all.

Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what's right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they're living in a good place full of good people.

(Schaffa saw her hand on the child's face, covering mouth and nose, pressing. Incomprehensible. Did she not know that Schaffa would love her son as he loved her? He would lay the boy down gently, so gently, in the wire chair.)