A Stone In His Chest
"I love you, I love you, I love you," she cries, holding onto his neck and sobbing. Her declaration has the urgency of a child's.
She does not see him close his eye, does not even see him, not really. Part of her is bidding farewell to the mother she cried for.
It is not a confession of romance. It is a confession of need: I need you, you're all I have left, please don't leave me alone. She is thirteen years old and desperate not to be alone now, this girl who did not bury her mother, who watched an old man die that she might live, who watched two (relatively, relatively, relatively) innocent men die because of her.
But still: she loves him. It is in her nature to love freely and carelessly, as loyally as he once loved.
He closes his eye and she doesn't know. He tells her what he almost told Maria, once, what he thought when he broke her heart: "You'll have a great life without me. Today, and tomorrow and for a long, long time."
For him, it's almost a speech, but she won't understand that until she's older.
She only understands that he is going to leave. That he is going to leave her, knowing that he won't come back, knowing that she needs him.
He turns his back on her to shut out the heartbreak.