But porca miseria, the things night can do to time. In place of hardwired sequence, it's more like everything all mixed up.

For a moment, he thought he sensed, beneath the visible world, some blind infrastructure connecting the two of them, or the three of them, and connecting them to still others. People he hadn't even met.

A vision of underground connections flashed before him again, only inverted. A towering construction like a tree strung with lights, shimmering, changing, and in the middle,
a darkness—the object or concept holding the visible together.

That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.

The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.

But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind's insistence that this was the same Regan he'd known when he was eight; had anything befallen her, the Regan he lost would have been the one who'd perched on the black rocks of the park back then, with all her futures inside.