He's there, in these quick glimmers. The boy she remembers, the one that it felt like was hers. Stolen from everyone else. Special and singular for so long. Until it wasn't, he wasn't, she wasn't. But there are sudden glimmers that catch her unexpectedly like he should be some other form of person. Someone who isn't that boy. Isn't the boy hidden beyond the white domino mask on the camera's. Isn't the one in those letters, still a mistake turned more hazy dream than reality.

She doesn't quite know who this is.

Except that they keep happening. Those glimmers.

The ease of his laugh and the curl of his smile, right before he answers her with that trained solemn seriousness. That slip of wide-eyed wonder and excitement, all but creating a static around him when he's looking at certain pieces. The embarrassed flicker of fluster, after he's played The Perfect Golden Boy, all suave smile and practiced pose of near a decade now.

Even this. Maybe this most of all. When he suddenly blurts out a confession, and it feels too familiar. Crests an ache in her chest, that makes her pulls her ribs in toward her spine just a little. Too many memories of waiting until they were alone. In the attic. In the living room. In one of their bedrooms. That wall crashing down eventually, where Luther just started expelling words like he'd been holding them in too long and only had seconds to finally admit them before he couldn't again.

It turns her expression soft, unguarded, aching with surprise she tries, and probably fails, to subdue. It tucks her mouth in at a corner impossibly drawing out of her, like a mirror unable to stop a reflection, with a shake of her head, like it's all that much more impossible in the face of that (and the winding relief she's not staring down her father): "I wasn't even in the country eleven hours ago."

It's a strange admission. More real than she likes, as it happens.
Like someone's pulled her strings to orchestra this accident.