My fingernails dug through plush sweater into my arms. Five on the one side, four on the other. The empty nailbed was a source of raw, pointed pain, throbbing with my every heartbeat, which was racing like it would if I was engaged in a hard run to my very limits.

I looked up at Darnall, and the man seemed to be at a bit of a loss.

I was describing a monster who could do anything and I had my proof on the far side of the screen. The poor guy might have felt like he was in over his head. Unfamiliar space, unfamiliar dynamics.

“Do you want to take fifteen minutes, return to this?” he asked.

“No. I want to get this over with so I can go over there and fucking help. So just, you know, ask the questions from the list, or rule me out, or whatever.”

“I have been asking the questions, in a roundabout way,” he said.

Had he? Maybe, if each question was a bullet point on a list, if he was going from the grounding, degrees of conviction, coherency of timeline and memory, giving cause to make contradicting statements…

I shook my head, feeling tense. I hadn’t ever relaxed my shoulders from that shrug. My arms were still folded, my fucking missing fingernail still fucking hurt like fuck.

“Victoria,” Jessica said, her voice soft. “If the Victoria of three months ago met the Victoria of now, would she be concerned?”

Straight from the list of questions.

I drew in a deep breath. “Probably. But I’d be concerned about her.”

“Why?”

Follow up question, right from the list.

“Because I would barely be recognizable to her. Because she’s, to the me of right now, paralyzed, trapped, secretly terrified of every dark corner and going back to that terrifies me.”

“Would the Victoria of five years ago be concerned?”

I relaxed my shoulders. “I think we’d both be a bit disappointed in each other.”

“Why?”

“Because I see her as a brute. A barbarian. Someone who hurt others because she thought of it as justice.”

“Why would she be concerned about you?” Jessica asked.

I thought of Vista’s room. Of Vista underwear and Gallant posters, of her having a boyfriend. Her music album art on the dorm room wall. The lines were super blurry, and I related to those blurry lines. The old me would have related. The me of now didn’t, really.

“Maybe because I’m only living half a life, and she fought too long and hard to maintain that half I’m ignoring despite everything about how we were raised making it so much harder to maintain,” I said.

“Is that getting better or worse, since that meeting last week?”

Still close to the script. Black text on white paper, from years ago. Reassuring.