Indifference is a protective measure, when so much is tumbling out around them; an unkind one, a difficult one. Not one that comes naturally to her, when she is so much more at home with someone else's pain than her own—when she has so much more compassion for that. It is too near, and too entangled with a conversation that bares too much of her own self; she cannot have this conversation and allow herself to be other than remote at the same time.

“No,” she says, and does not volunteer an alternative.

(She is so toweringly angry that she can barely see through it. She would burn all of this down just to forget. And she loves him, still, and she can never forgive him for that alone.)

After a moment,

“The past is the past,” a little softer. “We are given an opportunity here, and I would not waste it looking back at something that does not see me. We cannot change what is in our history. We cannot change the worlds that we came from any longer, we are not there. We will not return. The woman who died was not me, in truth, any longer. Our lives there continue without us and whatever hopes we might harbor for those lives—we will never touch them again.”

The woman who was never free of Marius wasn't her. She grieves that, more than anything; that someone was left behind to give her this. That the separation is not so clear-cut as she would have it be, but that it is enough to know...that a life was lived never knowing anything else. It is terrible all the more for knowing something better.

“You would not have chosen for me to see what I have been shown, any more than I wished you to see my own past. That we are not shown courtesy by the Fade does not mean I should be any less courteous, myself, in allowing you to choose for yourself what you will say of that. It is courtesy I wish to be shown.”