(Rebecca's POV)
I understand armor.
I wore my own version of it for six years, in a marriage where the only way to survive the daily disappointments was to build something hard and smooth around the softest parts of me, something that let the small cruelties slide off instead of landing where they could actually cut.
I know exactly what it costs to hold a shape like that day after day, and I know exactly how it feels from the outside — how cold it reads to the person standing across from you, how much it looks like indifference when really it's the opposite, so much feeling that the only way to survive it is to build a wall thick enough to hold the flood back.
The loneliness of the last two weeks doesn't get any smaller, sitting here with all of this laid out in front of me. It's still
