Wayne had never been able to love the dog Treadway brought home the day he dismantled the Ponte Vecchio. He wanted to love the dog but he couldn’t, a… - Kathleen Winter

Whereas he struck out on his own to decide how to erase the frightening ambiguity in their child, she envisioned living with it as it was . . . Whenever she imagined her child, grown up without interference from a judgemental world, she imagined its male and female halves as complementing each other, and as being secretly, almost magically powerful.

Wally Michelin had stomped through kindergarten and grades one and two with a certainty Wayne found fascinating . . . Wayne was in love with her from the moment he heard her crumbly voice. So in love he wished he could become her. If there was a way he could make himself into a ghost without a body - a shadow - or transparent like the lures his father used to catch Arctic char, he would have done it. He would have transformed into his father’s lure, slipped under Wally Michelin’s divinely freckled skin, and lived inside her, looking through her eyes.

She knew happiness was only one side of the coin and the coin was forever turning . . . Thomasina had every reason to be happy, but instead she held her heart at the same level she had always held it, because she did not trust extremes of feeling.