"Why are you tormenting me, Jarod? Why do you even care?" She looked around her in the cemetary, fighting back tears that came with the memories of happier times. This was her loss, her grief. No one else knew Tommy like she did; they couldn't know how he melted her heart and let her be free. The feeling went all the way back to the days with her mother.

She took Jarod's concern as torment, as another convoluted way of the saint himself to remind her how she wasn't what she pretended to be. Pretended, she thought about her choice of words and if they meant anything. But somehow she welcomed it, letting his concern enter the atrium of her heart, just over the threshold before she blocked it again.

-----

"You knew him before?" Her voice almost broke. It was the greatest deception she could imagine: Tommy hadn't been exclusively hers; someone else did know how gentle he was -had been. And suddenly, neither the pain belonged to her anymore. She couldn't be mad at Jarod, not today and not for that. And it felt as if a burden had been lifted from her shoulders; shared with another.

"Tell me about the Tommy you knew." Jarod had stolen a part of her romantic story -the only one she had-, which had been perfect to tell their kids one day, and left her with an oddly relieving emptiness. It didn't matter, stories or not, she knew how things were, how they had been together. All she still longed for was to bring back the memories she had of Tommy.

It was both absurd and familiar, talking to Jarod about her former lover, about the way she felt about him. There was no trace of their game left, she trusted him in ways she could never trust anyone else. She even took his advice of telling Tommy about her feelings. And she was glad that he cared after all.