“Fact was, Ellis’s job of covering fluff for the Society page didn’t amount to much else. Not exactly the hard-nosed reporting he’d envisioned for his career. A gopher could do the same work.” 

This quote shoes that Ellis is both ambitious and unhappy in his position, which helps to establish why Ellis’s character is willing to do things that other people might not to get ahead. Ellis has disdain for this work, which is considered work for female reporters, in part for the subject matter, but also because of the low pay, and because it does not challenge him like he thinks reporting real news will. 

“She could make something good out of the utterly horrible. She could bring children too easily forgotten to the foreground, a reminder that each of them mattered. A hard-won lesson from her past.” 

Lily’s character is motivated by her devotion to children based on her own experience of giving birth to Samuel out of wedlock and choosing to raise him as a single parent. Her circumstances of living in a town where people judged her and questioned the morality of raising him, motivates her to protect all children from the feelings of being unwanted, which links to the theme of the treatment and mistreatment of children. 

“’Cause the reason I’d called you in here was about writing a feature. A family profile to go with this photo of yours. If that isn’t too much trouble.” 

This quote sets the stage for the novel’s main conflict because Trimble assigns Ellis his first feature article, which is to write the story about the two boys in the picture that he took, and in turn, substitutes with the Dillard children. This moment also holds open the possibility that Ellis will develop into a byline reporter and fuels his ambition to become a serious newspaper reporter.