Status Updates From Homecoming

It was seven o’clock but still light, a drowsy early evening on a warm summer’s day, the sky starting to soften into the pink, purple, and gold folds of dusk, and the lower reaches of the garden just beginning to darken and cool. The colors and smells, the quality of the light, were visceral. Jess could feel them in the rhythm of her heartbeat, deep in her lungs, in the cells of her skin.

Words, Jess had observed, could be as tricky as people: seeming to say one thing, when all the while another, secret meaning lay beneath the surface.

Darling House seemed to know itself unoccupied. It was the opposite of a haunted house; without Nora it was a house without a spirit.
Morning sun streamed through the stained-glass fanlight above the door to land on the dark flagstones of the hallway, the beams thick with listless dust.

"Bad things happen to the best of people, and we cannot let them overwhelm us. Life doesn't always work out the way we plan, but it does work out in the end."