She hears him, and the silence between them is thick with what could be said, what won't be said. It's a bleakness only broken by the sound of the porcelain, something that runs too deep for words. They will never speak on it again - they will never truly lay it out, she thinks, and that's fine. She merely looks at him from the other side of a pit, the one that threatens to consume, that whispers they'll all leave and reminds her of what she really is.

"A painful path."

But not an unknown one. There's an intonation in her words, that it is known instead of remarked upon.