“When he’d said she could start work the following Monday, it took everything she had not to cry in front of him. She’d waited until she was walking home before breaking down. At the time, she was broke and hadn’t eaten in two days.”

This quote expresses Katie’s desperation without telling the reader anything about her dark past. Along with her thoughts on dying her hair, it shows that she is on the run, conjuring questions about her past that the reader hopes will soon be answered. The quote is also consistent with the author’s stylistic approach, in which he showcases characters’ emotions and sensations before detailing the context surrounding them.

“She didn’t have a television, a radio, a cell phone, or a microwave or even a car, and she could pack all her belongings in a single bag. She was twenty-seven years old, a former long-haired blond, with no real friends. She’d moved here with almost nothing, and months later she still had little.”

Like the previous quote, this also suggests that Katie is on the run and has a dark past. Here, however, the quote addresses her isolation in her past and the idea that she might have to pack up and leave at any moment, suggesting a woman who is being hunted. The reader can only wonder at this point who or what is hunting her.

“It was inevitable, of course, but somehow it didn’t seem right to Alex that they would never remember the sound of Carly’s laughter, or the tender way she’d held them as infants, or know how deeply she’d once loved them.”

Alex reflects on the fact that his children were only two and four when their mother died. Therefore, they would not remember her with the same clarity with which he remembers her. He is saddened by this, and it motivates him to find another woman to fill the role of mother and to be the same sort of tender, loving person that Carly was.