Gareth's voice hit the kitchen ceiling and came back at him unchanged.
The tiles were cold under his palms.
He sat on the kitchen floor with his back against the overturned table and his hands in his hair and the sticky warmth of something he was not going to name soaking through the knee of his pants, and he did the thing he always did when his brain was moving too fast for him to manage — he slapped himself.
Hard.
The flat of his palm against his own cheek, the sting precise and immediate and 'grounding', and he sat there with the heat of it spreading across his jaw and breathed.
"Stop." To himself. Quiet. The voice of a man pulling himself back from the edge of a conclusion by the collar. "Stop. You are having hallucinations. You have been having hallucinations since the garden. Since those absolute 'idiots' were — since that woman—"
He closed his eyes.
Opened them.
"Your mother is fine."
