She will smile—her mouth, kissed thing, attempting to recall its secondary purposes—and Agnes will want to tell her where she spent today, that her father died and she saw him and then left without speaking to her sisters. That she had been so afraid to look at him but that, when she did, the sight made her feel such a heap of nothingness—not a nothingness brought on by grief but by an absence of grief, an absence of anything at all—that she had to leave or risk opening her mouth and speaking the void aloud. She won’t say this, will only bring Stephanie’s hand to her mouth and bite it, just
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