[ Again, Sophie shakes her head, feeling a bit like one of those bobble-headed birds that people sometimes fix to the dashboards of their cars. That had always been her problem, hadn't it? She never said anything for far too long and so by the time she'd learned to open her mouth, nobody bothered to recognize the sound of her own voice and had simply cast it aside like white noise. ]

You were nice to me, [ and for some reason it sounds like more of a complaint than it should be. ] You didn't have to be, but you were.

[ That's the truth she keeps coming back to, the one that has her circling back to him even after everything he'd done. Sophie had packed her life up into a backpack and had thought her mother would loose sleep over it, though her dad would come looking. But nobody had come and nobody had called; in the end it had been Sophie who'd rung home and even then it hadn't earned her relief — just another earful. (—you ungrateful little—) ]

Real decent, you know? [ Half of her mouth crooks as she attempts another smile. ] If anyone asks, that's all I'll ever say.