[Reaction.]
She knew the house. She knew, she knew, she knew, and she closed her eyes, but the memory still came.
Exhale. Exhale, exhale, exhale, because it wasn't Marcus. It wasn't Marcus, but the man who stalked out of the house looked like Marcus. It had always been like looking at a strange reflection of her husband, looking at his father, like Marcus a decade or two down the line, and with grey hair at the temples and lines on his face that hadn't come from smiling.
Fists clenched, his, and her gaze dropped to those fists. Familiar, familiar, and she winced when the man in the memory thundered. Wince, flinch, become smaller, smaller, small.
She tried to focus on Caspar. His memory. His, his, not hers, his. And swimming, but the swimming brought this smack to present, and it was so close she could still see the words on the page, the ones about Caspar learning to swim. And it was wrong. What her father-in-law had done, it was wrong. And he was wrong about Matilda, too. It could last, it could.
She tried to close her eyes again, knowing Caspar wouldn't want anyone to see him broken, shards, empty, cracked. She wanted to hug him, to assure him he wasn't nothing, but the memory ended, and she stayed there, frozen in a time long gone, waiting for things that didn't come.
It was hard to remember it was over. It was so hard to remember it was over.