no such thing

• In a way she is used to being the butt of the joke; it's in the way that her aunts do up Josephine's hair and coo over her dimples and talk about her future husband like he's a king. Jacqueline grows under the shadow of a mother with too-many children, and she grows like a plant deprived of the sun; wilting, thin.

• Josephine clings to her cross. A lifeline. Jacqueline has no such thing. She never will, and she knows it, and she tells herself she's accepted it even when she wakes up in the middle of New Hanover and rolls and vomits. Josephine's got God, wherever she is, but God wouldn't have made something like /Jack/, oh no--God would never have Wasted His Time on her. Jack staggers to a nearby river and dunks her head and comes up gasping for air, face slick, wet.

• The gunshot rips through her side; Jack'll touch the wound later and realize just how close she was. In the moment, all she is: fear, crowing laughter, rushing limbs. She laughs when she runs but how else is she supposed to calculate this betrayal? A woman with a monster carved into the side of her face tracks Jack's bloodtrail for three days before Jack fakes her own death off the side of a cliff; she slinks away into the fog and prays she's not got an infection. Later, around a fire, Jack'll snarl something about love. Like it mattered. Like /love/ stopped that Governess from paying bounty hunters to try and bring her back alive. /Alive/. Why alive? To watch her die by inches?

• Truth: she wakes, shaking, limbs heavy. She remembers her father's face. She will always remember the face of her father. She'll think: I had to do it. She'll /know/: she didn't.