It is the small involuntary ones, the nod, the held door, the steady voice, the choosing not to look away from a frightened stranger, and we scatter those behind us constantly without counting them, and some of them land in soil we will never see.

She found that thought almost unbearably hopeful.

It meant that you did not have to be having your finest hour to change a life.

You only had to be, in the ordinary passing moments, the kind of person whose reflexes were kind.

Chapter 22 — The Wooden Box

The box was cedar, small, the kind of plain honest thing a person buys at a craft fair without quite knowing what it is for until later.

Maya kept it on the shelf in her bedroom where the evening light reached it, and over the months after the flight it collected the few things she had decided were worth keeping from a life that had nearly ended and then, improbably, begun again.