He says "I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to." So it is for sure that he is lying. When it's the truth he will go crazy trying to get me to believe him. He did--would--should care for her that much.

He lights up and looks off, looking pallid with his cigarette in light, and Clara can't feel what to say.

He says "I give all I got to give--to you. Everything that's in me I have given you."

Clara cannot feel.

He sucks his cigarette half to ash in one expression bitter with the taste of something true. He says "Clara my heart has been out to sea and back for you. But. But...in me there's needs you can't even see anymore."

Clara does not say anything and shifts herself on his sofa lounger. She brought her legs up underneath her in some borrowed shorts. Her hair is up in pins and her chin rests in her hand. It's early, for her, and she looks like she is dreaming out at the streetlight halos through the wet window. "I lost what I felt for you when you left me." The first words she said since he'd found her. The first words in over a week of her rising, feeding on him, and planting herself on the sofa. The sentence was too big for Leaves to process in the moment.

He distracted himself with the wet window's view. He counted the other trailers he knew to be seven and noticed again the beer cans and butts floating in the ash trays just under the window. "Loss isn't hard, with the benefit of time and experience," she was saying. "You may find it hard to believe, but I've lost, I mean lost, houses, family, status. I've lost a piece of a continent and one entire continent. All gone, gone forever." She turned from the window and looked at him. Her gaze was his morning. "You'd think this would have prepared me for losing one averaged-sized not especially--exceptionally beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent person. Except for your eyes. Your eyes were exceptionally beautiful and--" she suffocated that truth in her maw.

He says"I didn't--I searched for you all this time!" Immediately he felt the surge of childhood trauma (his mother leaving behind a new favorite toy he'd gotten in a Happy Meal on a trip back from Disney World--and the root of that hate for her that seethed and roiled to a fever pitch) pulse in his temples. He fell back onto the floor. "You're going to kill me," he is saying.

"No."

"Then--I can't just walk away. I won't!" He was defiant.

"No, you won't."

Trauma washed over him, and he knew it was Clara making sure he felt what she couldn't. Hopelessness--going out to sea every night searching for Clara's body in an ocean of black ink, coming back a failure for over three months, all while knowing she was imprisoned under murk and sand and a wooden pool cue. He spat out the cigarette and started heaving clear bile onto the carpet. Now he remembered the look on her face when he finally found her. Beautiful boundless fury.

"I lost what I felt for you when you betrayed me," Clara said as she began the long process of ensuring that betrayal would never happen again. The boy was lost, but his blood (his life!) was one loss she wouldn't endure tonight.