One mellows almost without realizing it's a compensation of age, because anger is exhausting. - Robert Galbraith

Neither of them could tell who had made the first move, or whether they acted in unison. They were holding each other tightly before they knew what happened, Robin's chin on Strike's shoulder, his face in her hair. He smelled of sweat, beer and surgical spirits, she, of roses and the faint perfume that he had missed when she was no longer in the office. The feel of her was both new and familiar, as though he had held her a long time ago, as though he had missed it without knowing it for year. Through the closed door upstairs the band playing on:

I'll go wherever you will go
If I could make you mine ...

He had hoped to spot the flickering shadow of a murderer as he turned the file's pages, but instead it was the ghost of Lula herself who emerged, gazing up at him, as victims of violent crimes sometimes did, through the detritus of their interrupted lives.

Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed.