" When she pulled it out, something tum- bled out along with it: a soft copper lock of her own hair.

She went blank for a moment, thrown oddly off bal ance. The things lined up neatly on the floor in front of her were like words to a sentence in a language she had only begun learning, a sentence punctuated poignantly by a copper curl. They told a story Rebecca sensed she already half knew, she could feel it radiating, increasing in light, on the far reaches of her awareness. "

― Julie Anne Long , The Runaway Duke