Faced with the theft of his own time, he responded not by clutching at what little he had left, but by arranging to give the thing itself, the pure substance of it, to others — turning the very shape of his loss into the shape of his gift.

I do not fully understand where a person finds that.

But I know that Cecelia comes from it, is half made of it, and I intend to make sure she knows that the man who gave her half her blood was the kind of man who, dying for want of time, spent his last strength giving time away to strangers he would never meet, and asked for nothing back.

Chapter 16 — Violet at the Elevators

I found Violet waiting near the elevators, back at the hospital, the next day.

She looked exhausted, hollowed out in the way that grief hollows a person, her eyes rimmed red, her hands folded tightly in her lap as though she were holding herself together by force.