oh my. Perverse-idyll told me to read this, and it's every bit as amazing as she said. It's this kind of writing, of storytelling and tone and mood and grim beauty, that makes me want to do better in things I have written as well. Because as others have already said, you take a character who we mostly have only our own ideas about and make her real, make her sympathetic, color her in. Gorgeous, just gorgeous.