[It's funny how he sounds like her. Funny how it feels to hear the same words she's said herself but in someone else's voice, offered up to her instead of handed out to someone else. I'm glad is so commonplace, so ill-fitted, that it's almost stupid, and yet there's really no better way of putting it, is there?

She chews the edge of her lip. There's a weight she's been carrying on her chest, too, and for all that she's done well to keep it under wraps, it keeps coiling tighter and tighter like an overwound spring. But maybe like this, it's fine. Neither one of them is finding any answers out here; maybe that makes it a good place to ask the questions she's been afraid to voice.]

I think it didn't want to. The beast.

[Even just that much of a confession feels like an absolution.]

I mean...I don't mean that. It did. It was killing all of us, I don't mean that I was anything special, or —

[I'd think, maybe I was special, and even the things that everyone else feared, I wouldn't, because they would like me. Just me and no one else, she'd said once, when she and Paul were playing at whims and fancies. And Paul had said — ]

I mean — it was as though, just for a second...

[Maybe I could have been one of your monster friends, Paul had said.]

...It was like it knew me. Like one bit of it knew me. And it stopped.