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She Looks Too Much Like Her Mother
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He always looks her straight in the eyes. He knows she doesn't like it, so he does it every time she's mad enough to stare at him – she glares, jaw clenched and brows furrowed and eyes wide and he admits to himself that he likes it better this way, because Julia would never look at him this way.
(he loved his wife)
The first time it happens, she's five and he's drunk for the first time since the funeral, and Julia is buried safely beneath fresh soil and cool slabs of marble; her face overlaps that of her daughter in his dysfunctional mind and he's reaching out before he can recognize his actions, his lips whispering "Julia...". Rinoa trips up the stairs as she runs away, crying, leaving him alone in the lavish living room that will never smell like fresh roses again.
(it's not her fault)
She learns to avoid him and spends her time in the library where he moved all the portraits and the vases with flower arrangements Julia loves (loved, she has to remind herself). He buys fragrance bottles by the dozen with fake flowers on them for his bedroom and then gets rid of all the feminine clothes there; she steals away in the middle of the night before the trash collectors come and sits outside with the garden lights out, shifting through them until she finds her favourite shirt and goes to sleep with it under her pillow.
(she looks too much)
All traces of a mother disappear from the house and the nannies cluck their tongues with disappointment, scolding, "Such a stubborn little girl." She stares at them silently until they throw their hands up in the air in defeat and go on with their lessons. All marks of a father soon disappear too and the only times these days she knows he's there is when she sits in her bedroom and hears the lock click, clutching at her pillows and throwing her mother's salvaged diaries at the walls.
(like her mother.)
Caraway stands outside her door without a sound and thinks that he's already lost one angel sent to him from Heaven; it wouldn't do good to lose another one as precious as this, and did Julia ever look like this as a child?