“... people who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.”
Laurel’s mother has once thanked life itself for having a second chance. None of her children noticed this remark except for Laurel, who suspected that some secret is hidden in her mother’s past and it is connected with this man she killed years ago (and Laurel witnessed the murder). When Laurel finds out the secret, she has the most warm and sincere conversation with her mother, and only after that realizes what gift a life is. Surely, there are situations when second chance is the only way to survive, but what is more important is to live a life so that the second chance would not be required. And this is true happiness.
“Love, Laurel, that's the only reason to get married. For love.”
Laurel consider her parents very happy, and right she is. Though their love story is not developed in the novel and little attention is paid to it, when Laurel was still a child she remembers her mother and father dancing when nobody is around. They used to laugh with no clear reason and always looked at each other with love and tenderness. These words show that Dorothy was really happy, she loved and was loved. Happiness in a family is based on many different peculiarities, but the strongest tie is love, and Dorothy always wanted her daughters to remember of it.
“It was unsettling, Laurel thought, suppressing a shiver, how quickly a person's presence could be erased, how easily civilization gave way to wilderness.”
When Laurel finally finds out the secret of her mother, she sighs with relief and is terrified at the same time. The real Dorothy had died years ago during the bombing of London, and Vivien took her place and became a new Dorothy. And this reality of the Second World War terrifies Laurel, as it was a time when a person could be erased from the surface of earth in few seconds and nobody would even know, and in the case of Dorothy, who was alone, nobody cared. The awful events of the war make the blood freeze.
