" She felt the pain of his loss inside her like a savage hook. She wanted to reach into him and take it out, as though it were shrapnel. But the pain was old to him, and somehow it had become a part of him. He could bear it and speak of it. It had shaped him; he had accommodated it. He had loved and he had lost and it had made him who he was. "

― Julie Anne Long , What I Did for a Duke (Pennyroyal Green, #5)