She starts the morning with six pomegranate seeds and a mug of black coffee, the ceramic dyed blood-red where her lips touch. When she's finished, she leaves the dishes spread across the table like a clue. The door stays open, just a crack. She doesn't bother to shut it the rest of the way. She hadn't brought much with her, so there's nothing to take now that she's going again.

She emerges, shading her eyes from the now-dazzling light with enormous, dark, sunglasses. And off she goes–hips swaying, and the smallest of smirks curving red red lips.

She walks a long time before a scream splits the air (of course it does; she’s been waiting for this) and all of a sudden she's caught up in her mother's tight embrace. Her mother, clutching  hard enough to bruise, tears falling to stain the fabric of her daughter's clinging dress.

You’re okay, she’s saying over and over and over. Oh God, oh God, you're okay.

Or maybe it’s a question–please please be okay say something please why won’t you say anything.

She could say something. Should, even. She knows that, and the guilt of it bites at her; but she knows, too, that nothing she could say will help ease the sting of what she's done. Instead, she holds her peace and clutches tight in wordless apology, and determinedly doesn’t think about the man who is, probably, waiting for her now. Who is, probably, desperately confused or hurt, or angry, even.

She hopes he’s all of those things, and hates herself for it. Because the truth is, she made her choices long ago. Made them every day she chose his broken darkness over what feels now like too-garish light. And she isn't sorry about them.

(Curiosity killed the cat, they say. The thought of the phrase makes her want to laugh, but she bites it back--it would be completely inappropriate, of course, at a moment like this.)

And the thing is–the truth is–she was happy with her choices, for a while. She loved him then, and maybe still loves him now.

But at some point that stopped being enough.

She’ll go back to him in six months’ time, the wordless promise of the dirty dishes she’d left behind. She wonders, in vague interest, what her parents will do when they find out. What he'll do, and what he might give her for coming back.

(She can taste the power of that thought on the tip of her tongue, sweet and slightly tangy as the fruit she’d eaten on her way out the door.)