She told him at the kitchen table over the tea, which he'd made properly — the teapot kind, not the bag-in-a-mug kind, which was a distinction he'd learned she made and which she'd never explicitly asked for but which he'd started doing about two months in.
She told him the whole conversation. Not performed, not edited — the full shape of it, including the part about Lucia who was five and didn't wait, because that part had gone somewhere in her chest and needed to come out.
He listened.
When she finished, she looked at her tea.
"He said I was different from how he imagined," she said.
"How had he imagined?"
"Angry. The room-taking kind."
"You are capable of that kind," he said.
"I know. I spent it a long time ago." She turned the cup. "He came, though. That's what I keep coming ba
