"There would be no need for concern if I honestly believed you to be okay,"

Giving an exhaustive sigh at what she deemed to be his stubborness, Charlotte was turning away from him and lifting the string of pearls he'd slid off of her and set on her bed. Admiring the jewelery passed on to her from her grandmother as it slid in between her slim fingers, she stilled as Leathan continued. She had half-expected him to be gone by that point, so much had she blocked him out.

"Were you 'all right' you wouldn't be here Charlotte, keeping yourself locked away into a world that you left behind. That you left behind because you know it's not you. Not deep down."

Turning, she felt a surge of anger at his assumptions, the pearls tightening in her left palm as she huffily said, "You presume you know so much about me, don't you? Well, you don't-"

"You do a fantastic imitation of belonging, Char. You really do. You have the look down, the manners, the false conversation hidden as true concern. All of it. And it's not you. What happened to the girl who told me that she didn't need help carrying boxes into her flat? The one who brought pizza over just to lord it over me that your team won a match? What happened to the girl who was so damn proud of having a job and making her own way in life? The girl who, in nothing more than a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, could make me sweat with need?"

Each word that followed, each statement and description of his perception of her when she'd begun to know him at the Lowell Flats struck her like a blow she hadn't seen coming, stunning her at first, before the level pain began to settle into her very being.

"Stop, stop it-" she tried to break in, her tension building even further when he brought to mind the very person she could no longer feel as herself. She could no longer believe to be her.

He was calling her a hypocrite with his own chosen words, his accusations to her weak facade hurting on more than one front, especially that he could see so easily through her. Swallowing tightly as his accusations were only followed by more, Charlotte lifted her chin with one last show of vehemence, her rage allowing her to do so. If nothing, she surmised, weakness would be her failure here.

"Stop hiding yourself behind this false veneer, Charlotte. Let yourself actually feel the pain of loss and face it. You'll fade away into a mere shadow of yourself if you don't. I've watched it happen to more witches and wizards than I can count. I will not let you join them."

"This is no false veneer, Leathan," she said with unbelievable calmness, though the frigid cool with which she spoke was not missed, "This is me. If it's so very hard to bear that you were so wrong about me, then I suggest your departure is very much expected.

"Leave, now," she commanded, the strain with which she spoke with such a surpression of her emotions causing the string of pearls in her hand to strain and then break, each individual one spilling onto the wood floor with an almost musical pattern. Falling to her knees with a hand over her mouth when she felt it break, she hurried in haphazard distress to catch each pearl, her veneer of calmness shattering as she began to tremble and whisper as if in a trance, "No, no no.."