"What were they like?"
Mom and dad. She didn't want to call them that. They didn't deserve it. She didn't want a fantasy, but that's what he gave her. To spite her or make her feel better she wasn't sure. It had done neither. She knew he was lying.
"I asked you to help me and you looked at me with disgust and walked away. I was a child."
Rosalind didn't look at her. She didn't take a seat. She wasn't sure why she had come, to say goodbye? To haunt her. She put her here to die. She left her mother alone to die in a horrible place, thinking it would make the past okay, and in some ways it had. It was the same cruelty that had been bashed over her head as a child, that coldness tightened around her heart and made it hard to breathe. It had been beaten into her. Inherited.
It was dark place. There were no windows. It smelled sweet like ethanol. There was a vase with cracks running through it. A few lonely flowers stuck up out of it, jarringly. Robert had been here. It didn't belong here and either did he.
"I was your daughter and you regretted me, but father loved me and you couldn't stand that, could you? You never say anything," Rosalind wasn't sure how many times she had been doing this, asking the same questions. She wasn't expecting a different result. She didn't have that kind of insanity. She wanted a reprieve from guilt. "Thank you for teaching me never to ask for help."
"You don't have to tell me what it's like to be unloved."
"No?" He asked gently. "But I do have to tell you what it means to love."
"It doesn't mean anything, dear brother. It's something you do."