[Reaction]
She's never had a stepmother. This occurs to Cass dreamily, as this settles like fog over her head, in the narrow bed in the narrow room in a Home filled with silences and shadows that rarely match the people they fall from. She's never had a one, her father enjoys, perhaps, the sadness of having lost things, the desire people have to find them for him. She doesn't know; she's never looked. Perhaps that's odd, that she hasn't, but she thinks some people do best when their insides are kept inside, when no one sees them for who they are. Her father has never hit her, but she feels the sting, the bite of metal across the cheek. She knows the weight of expectation, though. The shape disappointment takes when it asks you to dance.
She knows by the second stanza who has written the aching, broken sonnet. She knows by the shape of the memory and she knows it's memory, inside and out, to its bones. She knows the girl who is missing, and she curls her knees closer to her chest and sees lawyers like hawks, like vultures, like bright-eyed, beady birds who pick and hack at carcasses when the flesh is still warm, still heaving with last breaths. She's no idea why he's full of illusions still, why he doesn't flash pretty jade green in light of the opening verse.
But she knows that he's left. The core of him and who he is, untouched even stitched together and made whole once again. She knows what it's like to miss a father like an ache, an old hurt, a bruise that's yellowed all the way through to healing. Cass knows even the dark has shades of gray, even men who crush and count and hurt, have hurts. No one is the way they are all the way and she comes out of it with the taste of his own shades a remnant in her head, a ringing bell from a long-ago note and she dreams, the fingering of old webs tangling into knots.