There’s a hole in you where your heart once was. And in its place, you’ve put history.

And a reminder too of the sole faith that still offered her a semblance of comfort – the faith that history, soulless god though it was, never failed to offer what must be understood.

I don’t think I’m strong enough,” Aaron said. Slowly the steam faded from the pub’s windows. Helen was staring across the street as well. She said, “How do you think people get strong?

Do you hear the argument the other side makes?

And because history cared not at all if the negligent left its missives unread, she insisted on caring.

Even motionless, she was decisive.

You have a beauty of a sort,” he said. “But more important than that, you have enough manly strength in you to match me.

She had devoted her life to remembering. And yet she’d failed. She had, somewhere across the years, forgotten what she’d once understood. What Ester Velasquez had understood. That desire was the only truth worth following.

A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn’t what you thought it was.

The distances between things are vast,” he said. “They are vast.