She'd offered him tea. He'd declined. He hadn't even taken a seat, preferring to remain standing for the duration; an attempt to maintain professionalism and to enable a hasty retreat if necessary, the better to let those walls crumble behind closed doors and drawn curtains without him there. He had seen it in her eyes, and known what was to come, for it reminded him too much of his own way of coping. Only, he never truly copes. He just shuts it away in a neat little box, and pretends it didn't happen.