She remembers nineteen years old the first time a pubescent Matilda asks about love - nineteen and the bus to Reading, to the teacher's college she saw as an escape from her crunched world.
She remembers her second year, remembers the elderly classmates who took literature with her, remembers Benjamin with his childlike wonder and theories on reaching the children who didn't want to be there. It was never that they didn't want to learn because he believed that everyone did - he'd never met her aunt, but she would never say that to his face.
She remembers tea between classes poring over Steinbeck and Thomas, remembers the spare change Benjamin spent on her, how the coppers curved between his fingertips like his hand on her face, how his lips always smiled even as they touched her smooth skin.
She remembers running late and barely finishing supper on time, the bacon sizzling in the pans, hash burning the backs of her hands - cooking accident, she would say, as her aunt's eyes noted the black burns and her aunt's hands found the thick of her hair.
She remembers seeing her aunt out of the corner of her eye while sitting in the shop with Benjamin clasping her hands, covering them with his rough ones as the dark green fabric and knickers loomed just out of sight. When she returned home, her aunt was quiet - the hushed silence that still quickens her heart and makes her hands shake - but instead of asking about the boy in the shop, her aunt's hands found her chin and tilted her face up, dark eyes ever darker but a sneer covering her lips as they force themselves against hers.
She remembers whiskey, ale, gin - bitter - on her tongue and in her throat for weeks after that as she began to void Benjamin, head down on her desk, lips pursed together like jail cell doors - lock and key - one hand through light brown hair.
She remembers anger and fingers clasped around her throat and thinking she was foolish to trust anyone in the first place, remembers the boy crying over her because she could not cry over him, she'd shed too many tears already.
There were moments in-between, always close to her breast and closeted, because her cottage was not made for two but she'd always kept a second mug because...
Even after all this time, she was still a fool.