Don't own it.
"...roof it is."
Easier said than done.
For Anna, moving didn't mean walking. Even though she'd made the rounds of her room a time or two, extensive mobility still posed a problem. The leads had been removed at noon, but she still needed to carry her IV bag with her. And hell if Anna wasn't going to follow through and do this, whatever this was. She couldn't name it, but it was paramount.
Jane studied her with weighty blue eyes. Forbearing… expectant.
Anna threw the covers back and wobbled to her feet. She reached out for the IV bag and winced as she did so, transferring it to her left hand and facing Jane, stubborn and challenging as the day of the Carazolla showcase. Anna had walked out of that encounter the victor, Jane partially immobilized.
Why did it feel like the complete reverse this time?
"You never learn, do you?" Jane asked, and summarily walked out the door.
"Hey!" Anna griped. "You said we were going to—"
"Calm down," Jane snipped, wheeling in a chair from the hallway.
As if it could get any worse.
"It has an extension for the IV. I knew you wouldn't fare well cooped up in this room for as long as they wanted to keep you."
"I'm fine," Anna huffed, plopping into the chair. Jane attached the bag to the pole behind Anna and rolled her out into the hallway, darting quick looks through the corridors for patrolling nurses. "It's not like I can get into much trouble if they let me go to the cafeteria, or the friggin activity room. It sucks being kept in there like some zoo animal."
…
…
…
"Yes. It does, doesn't it?"
Well, fuck.
When Anna cast a glance at Jane, she glared back as if Anna had dismantled her sanity and kicked her puppy and murdered her single chance at life. And Anna felt terrified, for the first time in her life, of the woman pushing her along like some home health care worker.
They rode in the elevator, in it, not on top of it, toward the topmost floor and the emergency entrance to the roof. The hallway was long and dim, but wide enough for a stretcher to pass through. Jane pushed Anna silently along, and neither spoke.
Jane—Elsa—shouldered open the door at the end of the hallway, and the semi-mobile pair emerged onto the paved rooftop. Anna rolled herself through, noting the overturned crates and cigarette butts of nurses and surgeons on shift-breaks; the maintenance shed and massive generators on the far end of the roof; the helipad opposite; and there, behind the crates, was Jane's duffel.
Because she's still not safe. Will never be completely safe with me as a liability.
The pole of Anna's wheeled IV line creaked and her ribcage felt bloated and heated like a ticking, armed bomb. Her head was still reeling from medications injected yesterday, morphine, she remembered, and Elsa— no Jane, please still be Jane— couldn't face her or watch her or even come near her when she wasn't aiding her in some clinical, removed way. Jane walked backwards, putting a good two yards between herself and Anna.
"Well, go ahead," Anna said, the nails of her right hand digging the stuffing out of the shabby armrest on the wheelchair. She could suddenly feel the frigid fluid from her IV prickling at the ticklish juncture of her elbow, traveling up her arm and into her body. In the middle of August summer heat, she felt like she was slowly freezing to death.
Just from JaneElsaJaneElsaJane's stare.
"Go ahead? Like this is some pissy rant I can pitch and then we move on?" Jane asked. The blonde threw her shoulders back, puffed a breath from her bulging cheeks. Her arms crawled over her abdomen and clutched the sides of her navy shirt.
"My problem, now, Anna," Jane began calmly. "—is the same problem I've had from the start. But somehow, I never recognized the issue. No," Jane said sardonically, shaking her head. "I just denied there was one. Family trait, wouldn't you say?"
Anna waited.
"My problem, now, and my problem since I pulled you into my van, is that I have no fucking clue who you are."
Anna rubbed her chapped lips together. Despite the clear bag of fluid still pumping into her veins she felt dehydrated and sick, and her mouth was parched, and—
Had there been a tube down my throat?
"Anna!" Jane snapped at her. "Say something!"
"I love you," Anna croaked.
"Not that… I know that, and I don't— I can't— tell me why, Anna. You were with… him. And you left me there, knowing how unstable I would—you just…" Jane regarded her with utter confusion, expression tumultuous and violent as a crime scene.
"I… had to get you out," Anna said softly.
"At what cost, Anna? Did you… You…" Jane placed her hands at her head, rubbed her temples. "You just keep changing your story. Did you… what is the truth, Anna?" Jane asked, hands out, eyebrows pinched together in the center. She seemed unsure and… scared. So scared.
"Who are you?" Jane asked. "I don't mean your identity. Put the sister thing aside, for the moment. I want to know what the hell kind of person you are to willfully manipulate someone with the power equivalent of dynamite, so much so that she encourages them to take down a fucking building!"
"I shouldn't have done that to you," Anna began, but Jane had stirred the beast of resentment that had been hibernating since her admittance. "But I only saw one way out, and it meant hurting you, hurting you to make us safe."
Don't you understand? It was the only way to be rid of them forever.
"We needed to destroy that building, that corporation. I couldn't take them down, not like you could. And they deserved to be taken down. You would have never done it without me at least planting the seed in your head," Anna said. "Elsa—"
"Don't call me that!" Jane/Elsa shouted, (no, Jane, she fell in love with a woman named Jane). The sparks flew from her fingertips despite the gloves and puttered out by the time they reached the roof. Discharges shot from Jane's shoulders like sparkly pipe-cleaner pieces at craft time. She glimmered brilliantly in the sunlight. "Don't ever— that's not— God, Anna. Do you even know what you're saying?"
"I'm not sorry," Anna said angrily.
"And that's the most fucked up part," Jane chided. "That you knew what would happen. Behind that hut on their grounds, you told me to take that building down. You—you knew what I'd do if they so much as touched you, Anna. You turned me into… It just makes me wonder… how far were you willing to go? I probably could have stopped that bullet, but you didn't even hesitate—"
Anna bunched her eyebrows together, unsure of the conversation's trajectory.
"I didn't hesitate because I wanted to save your life."
"You pushed me down and…" Jane's pupils shifted back and forth, hands tightened on her torso. "Hans could have been in on it," she continued softly. "They haven't found his body. Maybe WGT was going to cut him loose now that they had me, and you were going to help him get his revenge by making me take out the building… he could've gut shot you on purpose, I imagine he's a fair marksman. He could be waiting for you, waiting for me to come crawling back to you and then he'd still have me, through you, this shitty ownership-by-proxy—"
"Do you hear yourself?!" Anna's eyes flew wide at the implication. "Do you really think that this is some hugely elaborate triple-cross?! That I'd let him shoot me? That I give a fuck about Hans and using you? I love you, and I don't know how to explain it any other way. Everything was for you! I had to play them, for you. I had to make you take down that building, so they wouldn't be able to hurt you ever again. I had to do what I did with Hans—"
"Anna, I didn't even know whose side you were on! I thought I was in hell when they locked me in that room, but those minutes watching you with him in the vent… were so much worse. I truly believed you fucked me to keep me as some—some sick trophy while you and Hans rode off into the sunset! And… you looked… I believed you wanted him, Anna. After everything. You were so damn convincing. You are so convincing, about everything, all the time. Anything you say, you say with such conviction that I don't know what to believe anymore."
Anna's veins flowed with icy fire. Pissed, furious, and miserable, she staggered upright and took lurching steps towards Jane, getting right in her face.
"Then you tell me, Jane," Anna begged, because she rightfully feared the truth.
And the truth, the condemnatory, abominable truth, was that she was more than willing to kill for the one she loved. More than willing to be Dr. Frankenstein to Jane's monster if it meant accomplishing her goal in the end.
"You tell me what I could have done, under the circumstances. What could I have done that wouldn't have tipped them off?! They needed to believe it so you had to believe it!" Anna shouted. "And that means I had to sell it."
"And that's just who you are, isn't it?" Jane answered wryly. "A con who does whatever it takes, right?"
Jane sparked in her face, electric rage and insults:
"As if I'm not enough of a freak already, you have me wondering just where the line is with you. Am I convenience? Am I your weapon? Is this what I'm supposed to expect from somebody who doesn't give two shits about killing civilians, some depraved, incestuous brat, a sister fucker—"
The slap was insubstantial and probably hurt her hand more than Jane's face. But the blonde's jaw was red like iodine, her head turned to the side, her jaw hanging limply open. The clap was certainly loud enough to constitute a slap, even if Anna felt too weak to believe she had delivered it. Her hand stung from infantile discharges residing in Jane's cheek.
"I'm sorry," Jane said, running trembling fingers over her magenta jawline. "That was uncalled for."
"Don't," Anna seethed, fury bubbling geyser-like just below the surface of her skin. "Don't you dare cheapen what I feel for you. It's not degrading. And my lies only serve to preserve what I have. I thought you knew that by now." Her grip on the IV pole tightened. "I'm fucked up, I get it, but I was in love with you. I'm still in love with you."
"Stop," Jane pleaded, and brought her hand down from her face, trying to get a handle on the wild sparks.
"No, I love you—"
"Please."
"I love you—"
"Shut up, Anna!"
"It's not something I can stop doing, Jane!"
"Jane, Elsa," Jane continued hotly. "How can you love someone who doesn't even know who she is? You shouldn't love me, for all of your actions, you don't love me."
"Jane? I love her. And Elsa, I love her, too. I love the Ice Queen, and I love her electricity, and I love—"
"Do you love your sister?" Jane challenged. Her eyes narrowed to slits, and she motioned toward Anna with an accusing finger. "Do you… romantically… sexually… love your own sister? Or can you lie to yourself like you lie to everyone else?"
"I—" there was a breeze at the back of her stupid nightgown, split down the spine for maximum indignity. Anna's backside was cold and she felt gross in hospital wears. Between the tugging line of the IV, the robe, and the persistent tears at her eyes, she didn't know what she felt more: hopelessness, or humiliation.
"I… yes," Anna muttered. "I do. I— I do, if that's what loving you means, then I love my sister," she finished strongly. "That's not a lie!"
"We're sisters," Jane said plainly.
"I… so what?" Anna said, shaking her head.
"And you didn't… even when I was—I was remembering, in the kitchen that morning, that first time… you didn't think to tell me—"
"I didn't think it was true!" Anna cut in. "Jane, I… I overheard it, in passing, that night we escaped Vegas. Hans and Al were talking and he just let it slip. I told you, there was no confirmation, I didn't know enough about WGT's project then to believe a word he said, and I couldn't… that couldn't stop me from making love to you."
"Even after you saw how I reacted when you told me your name?"
"I—" Anna began, but there was no justification.
There was nothing.
She screwed up.
"I wanted to be with you," Anna murmured, and knew then why she loved the lying life.
Lies weren't nearly as brutal as the truth.
"And…" Jane growled out the words, as if the action of speaking involved regurgitating jagged stones that tore through her vocal cords. "You thought it acceptable to propose to your sister?"
"I didn't know what to do," Anna answered her. "You found the ring, how was I supposed to explain that away?" Anna shied away from Jane's glare, walking back behind her wheelchair and rolling it closer. The IV was tugging on her arm, and Anna already felt as though she weren't operating with enough slack in this exchange.
"But let's not put this all on me, alright?" Anna mumbled as she moved. "You were pretty damn insistent that day, if I recall correctly."
"That's because I wasn't properly informed." Jane was trying, trying and failing, to maintain her composure.
Spark.
Spark.
Zap.
"It's a good thing, too," Anna began, inundated by spite. "Because if you were, you would've run away. You're good at that."
"You're deflecting," Jane said bluntly. "Sisters shouldn't be together. You cannot choose what to believe when science shows you the terrible truth."
"That's not our truth," Anna protested vehemently. "There are multiple truths, Jane, like the paintings? Back in Amsterdam, when content supersedes medium. Jane, we supersede our relation, we love each other—"
"I hate you."
…
…
…
"What?" Anna asked, the ball of sadness lodged in her dry throat.
"I hate you," Jane repeated darkly. "I hate you and your idealistic little world where you get everything you want, and damn anyone and everyone who stands in your way."
"No Jane, I love—"
Jane returned the slap. It felt like a thousand heated needles had taken up residence in Anna's cheek, like someone had set fire to her freckles.
"I hate you," Jane fumed, hands curling into fists. Her face crackled liked boiled egg shell.
"And I fucking love you, Anna. What you did to me, to us… I killed people for you," Jane shut her eyes and the dam broke. Tears welled then fell and dripped off the tip of her chin. "I hate you so much and I hate that I love you, and I hate that I hate you because I didn't think we were such bad people after we met each other and now… look at us! If loving you is going to result in casualties, then it's not something I can do anymore."
"No," Anna demanded.
Anna dripped sweat despite her internal chill. It was a humid, thick summer. The sun's rays bounced off the surface of the roof, creating hazy mirages of heat that Anna absorbed like radiation. Her insides were freezing from the IV, and her outsides were roasting from the sun.
Either way, she was surely dying.
"I knew it from the beginning. I'm a danger, Anna. You… you lulled me into a false sense of security. And if I'm good at running, well… maybe I should just stick to that," Jane said, shuffling from toe to toe, sparking at random. "I shouldn't… I can't be with you right now. Not while I'm—" a tiny bolt flew from her hand and charred a black spot in the roof. Jane leapt back and Anna's knees shook.
"Jane, no," Anna moved forward, reached for a hand that Jane jerked away. "Please, God, don't go, don't drink again, just because it tempers it. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, please—"
"How can you expect me to stay, Anna?" Jane asked sincerely. "After what I've… after what we've done? How can I be near you when you just… disregarded the most salient detail of our relationship because of what? Sex? Physicality? And then you lied to my face. You got me so messed up in the head that I killed people," she cried, alarmingly gentle. "You kissed Hans and you jumped in front of a fucking gun and you're just so… I don't know what to expect from you, Anna, I can't keep up with your head. You told Weselton, 'I don't care what you do to her, as long as you let me go.' I remember, and it hurts, even if it wasn't real, it still hurts. If it had been one thing, just the one… but all of this together, how am I supposed to support that? How am I supposed to stand under the weight of it all? Under the weight of you?"
There was something like grief in Jane's unsure gaze, a lament for hope, for something unspeakable.
Grieving for an impending loss was still grief, right?
Preemptive mourning.
"You wanted me, too," Anna muttered. "Don't you dare tell me you didn't want it. Concede that point before we go any further."
Jane bowed her head and shut her eyes in the affirmative.
"Regardless, you shouldn't have been the only one to make that call. There were two people in that bedroom. Manipulation number one. Not to mention the fact that you knew we were sisters and you still proposed. Number two, because I know you've only ever wanted consistency," Jane broke eye contact, studied the cityscape. "You don't realize it, but that ring is a link in a much larger chain that I don't want tied around my neck, Anna."
"But you love me."
"I do," Jane said placidly. "I do love you, so very much. But that still doesn't make it okay. The sex… withholding the information, I could forgive. But compound that with your actions at WGT, your recklessness, prompting me to take down the lab… one with people still in it. When I'm around you, I do these things… all you have to do is whisper in my ear and I'm a stripper, or a killer or a gambler or some shitty karaoke singer. I stand back and I let you Tase a man half to death, ruin a job that I was running point on and that's never been me. That's not me, Anna. I do those things for you but I can't— I can't anticipate you. I don't think I've ever been able to read you, don't feel like I know who you are. I don't feel like you know who you are. I don't know who I am when I'm with you and I can't deal with something so… unstable."
"I'm not… how… is this all we get now?!" Anna gasped, on the verge of hysteria.
"It's all we deserve. Ours are not lives lived smoothly. We're not good people, Anna."
"But we're not bad people, either," Anna demanded, and she knew it was irrational.
Because hers was the track record of a rotten, wicked person.
"I can't apologize for what I did," Anna stuck to her story, defended until the bitter, bitter end. "It got you out. Can you not accept it? Accept me? Accept selected truths… just… just love me again."
"I can't love you just because you tell me to. I love you because it's something I feel, and I hate you, detest you, because— because… I couldn't live with myself if I didn't."
...
...
...
What.
"Hating me? That makes it easier to live with yourself?!" Anna fumed. "What I'm getting from this—" Anna barked, and motioned between their bodies, "—is that you might not hate me. You might not detest me, but you're convincing yourself otherwise just to mitigate your own guilt?" Anna's voice went up to an unnatural octave. "God, maybe you're right. Maybe we are horrible people."
"You shouldn't turn this around on me," Jane warned, tone steely. "You've got to come to terms with your own selfishness."
"Selfishness?!"
"Come off it," Jane challenged. "You are selfish and you are needy and greedy and jealous and desperate to be loved, to be noticed. You said so yourself! You are impatient and self-indulgent to the point of manipulation, and you've never stomached a remark that hasn't been to your liking. You are selfless only when some outside force stands in the way of what you want, and that bullet hole in your gut is case in point. You are a child, who won't accept 'no' as a plausible answer. And that—that person—that is both A and Anna. You think by pulling the right strings you can always get a yes, always have your way. But the world doesn't always ask the right questions, Anna. Sometimes the only answer is a resounding, necessary no."
"Then maybe the question is bullshit!" Anna shouted.
"Anna—"
"Stop and shut up. You want to get into this? Fine, we're into it. I'm selfish and messy and me-me-me, I-I-I, but you are a fucking coward, Jane," Anna spat. "You want to sugarcoat it? Call it pragmatism or sacrifice, but nobody likes a martyr for a stupid cause! You are a coward who runs at the first sight of conflict, and you are so fucking weak. You've been isolated so long that you don't know what's real and what's a show. You look at yourself and your actions over the past few months and call it losing yourself? I call it fucking social progress! You've got your muscles and your stoicism and your reserve but don't dare pretend that you're the strong one here. Abandoning me is not the answer. You don't even have the balls to answer the question when it's asked. Like you said, it's a simple yes or no, so here's me, asking the question: If I had told you I was your sister, stated it explicitly, would you still have made love to me?"
…
…
…
"Look at me!" Anna screeched.
Jane's eyes were on the horizon. Even if Jane had faced her, had cupped her cheeks in hand and tried to engage, Anna wouldn't have been able to steady her vision. The summer light shined incandescent, and she couldn't see for the glare, for the blinding brightness. Wavy heat converged into something intangible, weightless and impairing. She had once been so certain of her actions, so determined she could right the wrongs done to her. That she could rise above her situation. But now she stumbled, now she faltered, in the chilling heat of a Manhattan August.
Anna had it wrong all along.
She was never the sun. She was just flying so close she couldn't separate herself from the thing that was killing her.
Icarus was falling.
"Speak up, dammit, if you're no coward," Anna mumbled defensively.
"I…"
"What?" she heaved. Standing was becoming more and more difficult.
"I… of course. I… yes, I would've stayed with you," Jane murmured. "I would have… I still would've made love to you."
Anna did not speak for a long while, freezing and melting on a hospital rooftop. Jane stared at her, and Anna stared back.
"Did you know that we were sisters when you had that mini-meltdown in the kitchen?" Anna started, suspicions fueling her accusation. "When I told you my name and your brain was burning? You said it felt like memory. You said you remembered. How much then? How much did you remember?"
Jane took a moment to answer.
"I remembered you, though even now, I can't say in what capacity."
"So you didn't know we were related?" Anna prodded the viper in the corner. "I want an honest answer from you, Jane."
"I… suspected," Jane confessed.
…
…
…
"Then how dare you," Anna said, stumbling into the gripping gravel on the rooftop. A large stone locked in the wheels of her wheelchair and sent the metal contraption toppling. The tube and needle were ripped from her arm, and blood pooled at the inside of her elbow. She clapped her left hand over it and stuck her arm skyward, stretching the stitches along her abdomen and shooting pain through her torso.
Jane stepped forward to help.
"No, let me say this," Anna insisted, blood droplets slipping through her fingers. It wasn't a gush, but a trickle, and Anna feared that was how this encounter would end. No bang. Just whimper. The liquid morphed into a bright, Valentine red when the blood made contact with oxygen. She probably looked demonic from her weariness, from her strange pose. And it killed her to know this would be the way Jane would remember her.
Broken and bleeding, and falling from pride.
"How dare you judge me if you can't even speak to your own actions," Anna charged her. "It hurt me, too, it still hurts me, that I lied to you, so how dare you act like you're the only victim here, that you're the only one who got a raw deal out of our wonderful tragedy."
"You betrayed me," the blonde insisted. "I knew nothing for sure."
"I knew nothing for sure!" Anna shrieked.
"But it's not just the omission, Anna. It was everything after that."
"I never said I wouldn't lie to you," Anna clarified. "Only that I would love you."
"I've already said how I feel about you, Anna. Don't twist things. It's… it's not that you're my sister—"
"Yes it is. Stop lying, if you're so against falsifying information."
"Alright. That's part of it," Jane conceded.
"And the other part is that you still think yourself a monster."
…
…
…
"But you know I don't," Anna swore.
"I would've moved past it, the sister thing," Jane continued. "I could've thought myself into a pleasant denial if you had only told me," the blue of Jane's eyes was cloudy and swimming in salt water. With her hands crawling back over her abdomen she clutched her sides, as if she could keep her body from falling apart at the joints. She was shaking, and her words were wobbly.
"That's what stings the most, what chars and b-b-blisters what's left of my heart. You had to put on that whole charade with Hans, and it hurt me. That you thought so little of me and my l-l-love that you didn't even tell me, that you didn't even let me help you… that you wouldn't trust me to make that choice and act on it. To ch-choose you. To choose you over everything! Over sisters, or powers, or Hans, or experiments! You made me topple a building, when you just could have come for me. I'm a… I'm a murderer, now. I would've done all I could, with minimal damage, but you never gave me the chance. After all this time, and you still don't trust me."
Jane took deep, gurgling breaths through her tears, reiterated her point with a wayward bolt, striking the ledge of the building:
"You don't trust me, Anna!"
…
…
…
"There was nothing I could do," Anna hummed.
"I think there was. You were trapped in an impossible situation, I can appreciate that. But there had to be another way."
"There's not always another way."
Jane's head flopped back against the exterior of the maintenance shed. She brought glove-covered hands to her cheeks and swiped at them to clear her vision.
"I can't stay with you right now," Jane whispered, and the tears were having a field day on her face. A rogue spark fluttered from her fingertip. "I need time."
"At least see me through this hospital stay. Please," Anna said. Her arm fell, and slow blood bubbled at the uncovered puncture from the IV.
"You're out of ICU. They'll discharge you soon," Jane said, authority and steadiness returning to her voice. Back to Ice Queen. "You'll be okay, Anna."
"So that's it? That's everything with us? 'I love you sis, which sucks, so catch you…' when?" Anna asked, and her voice cracked through her tears. "… never?"
"We could never be sisters," Jane said. "We lost that chance."
"And you're saying we can't be lovers, either."
"No, not… now. I don't… Time, Anna. Give me time."
"How much time?" Anna questioned. "I just, I have to have something, Jane. Friendship… back to fucking criminal camaraderie, at the very least. A phone call I can look forward to on Christmas—God, Jane, work with me here!"
"You would be happy with that?" Jane questioned, complete skepticism. "You would be content to sit by the phone from now until doomsday, waiting for me to call you?"
"I would."
"That's pathetic."
"That's love, and yeah, it is pathetic."
"I can't believe you don't want more than that," Jane said.
"I do want more. But I'll take what I can get. If I can't be with you, I at least get to know you're alive. If you're going to abandon me then I deserve a phone call. Get off your high horse and pick up the damn phone. Once a week, so I know you haven't smashed your skull on the pavement somewhere, or drowned in a bottle when things don't run as fucking smooth as your computers."
Jane growled at her. "Fuck you."
"You did!" Anna sneered.
Jane turned her attention to the duffel bag behind the maintenance shed.
"I'll call you," Jane acquiesced. "But I need to work on some things. You do, too, Anna. Let me… let me be your sister, just this once, and encourage you to think about what it is you really want."
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
"You can't… you can't leave me like this, Jane!" Anna yelled.
Jane didn't respond. She walked toward the duffel and pulled a pile of ropes from inside, looping one end around a fire escape handle. She began tugging the harness on with practiced, robotic movements and didn't even look back when Anna fell to the ground, shaking.
"I'll come after you! Don't think I won't!" Anna babbled, and her stomach was aching. There must have been some morphine still in that drip...
"Do you think you can find me if I don't want to be found?" Jane questioned. "Maybe… maybe you should focus on finding out who you are, instead."
"Please—"
"Anna," Jane said, and finally crossed the distance to where Anna sat, shivering. Jane reached out and brushed her fingers across Anna's cheek, kissed her forehead. Anna could feel the moisture from her tears, the charges on her lips. "I won't say goodbye. But we were very much in the wrong here, and I need to put it right."
Jane hooked the cord into the harness, tugged at the sailor knot wrapped round the fire escape. The hospital wasn't tall, only fifteen stories, a dwarf in New York. But that didn't make the exit any less dangerous, any less hurtful.
"Wait!" Anna bellowed, and she cried, and she cried.
Jane gave her the courtesy of a look backward over her shoulder.
"Fuck you," Anna managed.
"I love you," Jane said, and swan dived toward the earth.
"I love you," Anna replied, and she wept until the nurses found her.
To the review box with your woes! We are not done, friends.