My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited ….

In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever co….

Norah looked at her son’s tiny face, surprised, as always, by his name. he had not grown into it yet, he still wore it like a wrist band, something t….

There was something not quite right about her eagerness, an eerie kind of voyeurism in her need for bad news..

This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living….

...bleak territory of the heart..

The Lake of Dreams grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel..

The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon..

That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him..

The city of Pittsburgh gleaming suddenly before her . . . so startling in its vastness and its beauty that she had gasped and slowed, afraid of losin….

...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood..

His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two..

He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding h….

This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for gran….

Norah watched him, serious and utterly absorbed in his task, overcome by the simple fact of his existence..

No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart..

He fished in his pocket for his keys and instead pulled out the last geode, gray and smooth, earth-shaped. He held it, warming in his palm, thinking ….

So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could….

He could hardly imagine anymore what his life would be without the weight of his hidden knowledge. He'd come to think of it as a kind of penance. It ….

The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It's a kind of power, isn't it, knowing a secret? But la….

Once, this whole world had been hidden beneath a shallow sea..