She turned round slowly, drying her hands on a soft towel, and the smile slipped. What replaced it looked like real hurt. Real confusion.
"Fantasy?" she said. Her voice shook a little, and her cyan-green eyes went wide, searching my face. "Arthur, how can you say that? This is us. This is real. You came home. You hugged me." The last part came out almost as an accusation. "This is what we could have had. What we should have had."
"What we could have had died a lifetime ago," I said. I kept my voice level and didn't take the bait. "However good this is, however much you want it, it isn't real. You folded me into it the moment I crossed your door. The game's over. Let me go."
The hurt was gone in an instant. In its place came something hungrier and more urgent. She'd assumed that because I'd played along, I'd accepted. I hadn't. So she changed tack, fast, the way she always had.
