The Girl with No Shadow (Chocolat, #2)

by Joanne Harris

It’s all an illusion, I’m afraid. For most people here, those times never existed. They live in a world that is part fantasy, where the past is so deeply buried beneath wishful thinking and regret that they have almost come to believe their own fiction.

Did my own mother feel the same? Did she feel that sense of loss, that fear even greater than the fear of death, as she tried in vain, as all mothers do, to freeze the remorseless passage of time? Did she follow me, as I follow Anouk, picking up markers on the road? The toys outgrown; clothes cast off; bedtime stories left untold; all abandoned in her wake as the child runs ever eagerly into the future, away from childhood, away from me—