He had forgotten the one thing that undoes every architect of that kind of cruelty in the end.

No lie stays buried for good — the truth is patient, and it keeps, and one ordinary morning it works its way loose.

And the people he had worked so hard, for so long, to keep apart from one another turned out to be the very people who would take one look at what he had done, close ranks around two heartbroken children, and build the whole rest of their future together — with a brand-new bucket, and a faded pink shovel, and not one backward glance at the man who was no longer in the picture.

I think about the shovel a great deal now.