Re: hannah and david: woods
He didn't mind having her arm in his. There was the cloth of his sleeve between them so there would be no accidental contact, and it made the walk feel jaunty and congenial. "You're not a blank," he said. "You're mysterious. They're different things. People like to write their own solution to a mystery. They like a puzzle to solve, and the more their loss if they don't see who you are." Amy kept talking in that way she had, where words spilled out in a colorful stream, and if he hadn't listened closely he might have missed her saying that she had found what she was looking for. That drew a little warmth out of him. "You keep it that way. As long as you like." Good. If she had found love, then that was good and right, so long as, this time, the object of it treated her like a person and not a riddle.
"He was?" he asked. And he absorbed the fact that Amy had killed Marcus, that she had looked him in the eye and ended his life, and he listened to her talk it through. That look, the light going out - he had his own points of reference for it, and he could put those faces in the imaginary scene, see a little of what she had seen. "What did it feel like? When it was done."
"You shot a man in the face," he said.
He hadn't known the story about Mars - about where she had gone. "Parts?" Like a spare tire? "Someone ought to kill your father, one of these days." A soft musing, and not at all a joke. She, too, had earned enough trust to know exactly what he thought about it. "Or take back the pieces he took. On a fine Sunday afternoon. All at once." He laughed.