“I'd tried so hard. Given my all to be the perfect Elsie he wanted and..." It almost hurts too much to say it.

"You gave him a perfect version of you, and he still didn't want you," Jack says prosaically. Almost detached. Like I'm a gravitational singularity that can be explained, cataloged, predicted. I'm momentarily stunned by how right he is. Then I'm surprised that I'm even surprised.

"And what you took away from it was that you had to try harder.”