true-pretenses

You might forget,' he said. 'You can't hold on to a person when they're gone. You can't even hold on to people who are alive sometimes. I don't remember my mother's face. Not really. But I tell myself -- I'm still here. So much of who I am and what I do comes from her, I'm remembering her just by living. Every time I tilt my head or pick up a teacup the way she used to, that's a little bit of her still in the world.

She was the kind of art that was so valuable it wasn't even for sale, and she smiled when she saw Ash. His pulse jumped.

She nodded without conviction, wishing she could be so carefree, and not the sort of person for whom an unanswered letter gnawed away at the back of her mind. Nobody liked a stick-in-the-mud...but they liked all the things sticks-in-the-mud did for them, didn't they? They liked not having to worry because someone else, someone who couldn't sleep when she had left a duty unperformed, would make sure that nothing too terrible happened.

Learning that he was a professional swindler should have made her shame a hundred times worse. Instead, it took the sting out of it. The whole affair was disgusting, and she was unwise to have trusted him, but she had been one of many victims. She wouldn't stand out in his mind as more foolish than other women. What a strange, vain thing the mind was.