She must have always been a child on somebody’s list. He only avoided thinking about it. But all the time she was carrying her disappearance in her drawn face, her reluctant walk, and if he hadn’t needed her protection so much he might have seen in time how little she could protect anything, even their mean nest. He couldn’t talk to her—it was arguing with his own ghost from ten years ago, the same idealism, the adolescent fury—items that had charmed him once—a woman with spirit!—but which he came to see as evidence of her single-mindedness, even, he could swear, some desire to be actually
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