Strangers in Time

by David Baldacci

“I guess your wife liked books.” “Yes, indeed. She said they were a wonderful way to get through troubling times, though my sales of late do not necessarily support that conclusion. Perhaps it’s the location. This alleyway can be rather hard to find.”

“If you know where everything is, there is never a sense of surprise or discovery, which she believed were the most delightful sensations.

Humans make poor gods. We’re just not up to it.

“War is never the answer, Ignatius,” she said. “Never.”

Dante had nothing on Hitler.

She knew there was a price to be paid with important relationships like that. They were wonderful, but they also had the capacity to exact a punishing price when one in the relationship was gone. Grief, sadness, anger at a loss, and terrible, unrelenting hurt were the costs to be paid for loving and being loved. It felt completely worth the bargain right up until the very moment payment was demanded.

Yet together they had confronted a collective hardship that, at times, seemed beyond anyone’s capacity. It spoke well indeed of the resilience of the human spirit when one had friends with whom to share the sometimes calamitous burden of existence. We all need someone at certain times in our lives. It makes the inevitable pain lessened and the periods of happiness exalted.