"Oh, like you wouldn't have done, eventually," she snaps, moving to sit up straighter in her bed. She wishes she weren't so dizzy; she wishes she weren't so bogged down by the various needles and tubes poking in and out of her. She wishes she weren't so weak and on the verge of collapsing into hysterical sobs just from the memories of the other night, let alone with what Flavia tells her now. She bunches her fingers into her sheets, twisting them for lack of being able to use them otherwise.

If she were able, she would have marched right up to her youngest sister and towered over her with a glare, the way she used to back in Bishop's Lacey.

Flavia's next words land squarely in the middle of her chest, like bullet wounds. If she had any color left in her face at all, it would have drained from her like the blood the vampires spilled from her.

"You think? You think?" She hates herself for the way her voice cracks. She hates that she can feel her own lips trembling, like those of an abandoned child. She hates that she cannot bring herself to raise her voice.

"You think I did this for sympathy?" She asks, her voice deadly quiet as a whisper. She can taste the barest edges of bile rising in her throat; she has to fight the urge to retch. "You think I deliberately put myself in harm's way just so I could see my mother again?" She spits out the words as violently as she can muster

"Harriet would be ashamed of you," she tells her. "That, is of course, if you were her actual daughter."

She wishes so much that she could hate her youngest sister: the spitting image of their missing mother. But she can't.

Which is why, of course, her chest starts heaving as tears fall from her eyes like heavy rain. She collapses back against her pillows, sobbing the way she only allowed herself to do as a child as she buries her head beneath the fabric and wishing, just for a moment, for Harriet to be with her again.