When Liliana took her hand, Eleanor blinked, startled by the gesture, and then she blinked again when she realized that her vision of the woman had gone all blurry with the tears gathering in her eyes, worse and worse the more she spoke, the more it felt like she'd somehow managed to peel away all the surface layers and look into the very crux of what lay beneath her, inside the utterly fathomless pit inside of her, and then she was crying, the tears pushed down her cheeks from all the blinking, and the knot inside unraveling with a sob.

"I was only trying to make things better! But instead I only made everything so much worse!"

And then she realized that she had come to this unsuspecting person's home and intruded on her Sunday and maybe even her own guests just to break down into a sobbing mess, and she sniffed and tried to swallow that all right back down into the endless pit of her stomach, wiping the tears away with the back of her other hand and realizing what a long, wonderful, horrible weekend it had all been.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean....I didn't mean to do all this, I was just hoping..." Another desperate sob, and she really wish she could go back, even if only to just when she thought it was a good idea to come here in the first place. "I don't know who to go to about any of this!"