~Matteo POV~
She was fighting herself in front of us and I had no instrument for watching it.
That was the honest accounting of what the next several minutes produced in me. I had watched difficult things in my life. People I was responsible for going down in fights I could not reach in time. Decisions made in real time with incomplete information that produced outcomes I carried afterward.
None of those had the specific quality of watching someone I knew well from the inside out struggle visibly for control of their own body, every muscle and movement contested, the particular wrongness of a face you recognized producing expressions that did not belong to the person behind it.
