She has had ample opportunity to observe him. Their long nights together. The days spent exploring the public and the secret parts of this amazing city. He has shown her things she never knew, and she has lived here all her life. Some days she cannot take her eyes off him. If she blinks, she might miss a clue. And he has impressed upon her, repeatedly, the supremacy of the clue.
He is remarkable in repose. Sleeping, draped on the couch with one arm flung wide as if to scoop up dreams, he is abandoned, his mind relinquishing control of its container and flying free in realms it has created. Sometimes she pauses, watching, for long moments, hesitating to disturb him, relishing the chance to see him at peace.
But in motion he holds, for her, his true fascination. In motion he is ... essential, the truest portrait of himself, of the man she has become so attached to that life without him at her side is unimaginable.
In motion he reveals clues about his inner life, the things he tries to hide, or perhaps, the things he wishes he could show her but does not know how.
He has a peculiar tic. He speaks: words emerge, clipped stabs of sound, and then the speech ends but his mouth continues to move. A little motion, some excess energy, as if he has more to say than he allows himself. His brain warns him from those extra words, but his body, freed to move by the act of speech, cannot cease as readily as he wishes and betrays the tumult of ideas he clasps to his core.
When a glassmaker blows glass, the action is as smooth and fluid as the molten substance he works, yet at the end, a nub is left over, the result of the cessation of blowing. This nub is called a moil. That is what Sherlock shows at the ends of his sentences, a moil, the tiny parts he snaps off, discards, withholds from the conversation.
Can those parts be collected, thrust back into the furnace of his mind, drawn out again into a more beautiful shape than these soundless tells?
She is being sentimental, and he despises that as purposeless. Yet he is impossible to resist. Even that woman was felled by his quickness, his strength, his shy charm. That he keeps so much of himself hidden now is, Joan is certain, the fault of that woman's social antipathy, her incapacity for selflessness.
The woman did love him. Joan saw it with a clarity she generally only experiences when Sherlock is nearby. It was as clear as glass. But that love was brittle, too, and liable to crack under the strain of, for example, a perceived rival. Joan would not deny or confirm the suspicion, and the woman's reaction was proof - jealous rage.
Love presents differently in each person. Some people declare. Some people remain steadfast and true, caring without thought of return, and never speak of it. Some people resist love and succumb against their so called better judgement until some provocation, perhaps in a restaurant, leads them to reveal it.
And some people are so full of love that it leaks out despite their efforts to hold it inside. They wish they could stop feeling but they cannot. They stifle emotion, attempt pure logic, pure deduction, but after that perfect utterance is created, and concentration is relaxed, a tiny moil remains, the sign of things never meant to be spoken, a precious remnant, the evidence of love.