how nice it'd be

Because I do think the ending we're going with is the one where she turned herself in and went to prison about it. Like, we know it has to be one of the good ending because Sandra all but tells us so—"I knew one person on the police force who was what he'd done wrong and tried to change" is a pretty clear description of the version of case 4 where you call Hugo out for what he did and he apologizes to her—and, frankly, ANY version of the world where Sandra speaks kindly of Hugo automatically has to be a good ending world. And I think it's the good ending where she goes to prison, because she owns the bookshop. It's possible that she could have left the country and then returned later. Timeline-wise, maybe twenty-ish years is enough to leave and then return, especially after the war did what wars do to the records and systems used to keep track of criminals. But fleeing the country to avoid being arrested for a crime and then returning to that same country, with the same name, to buy back your old bar and meet the people who knew you back then (and befriend them again, to the point where you are now running the passion project bookshop of one of them!!) is just—I mean. At that point you're not hiding your identity so much as you're expecting the sheer audacity of it all to keep people from investigating you. So I'm assuming that LNLC does in fact follow off the BSC ending where she turns herself in, goes to prison, and Hugo helps her get the best outcome.

But that would mean that immediately post-BSC, her primary contact outside of the prison, and the one most responsible for ensuring she didn't get chewed up and spit out by the system again, was Hugo. And we know what happened to Hugo.

Best case scenario, she gets out of prison before the scandal breaks. Best case scenario, she loses the primary person helping her navigate her case not long after she gets out—Hugo was killed in the early thirties, so even if we assume she speedran her trial and got a wildly short sentence, she couldn't have had much time to get back on her feet before he was murdered and she lost the main person with the institutional power to help her. And that's the best case scenario, where he was in contact with her the entire time she was imprisoned, and where she had some amount of time to set herself up using the resources he had before he was dead. In the worst case scenario, halfway through her prison sentence, Hugo just—disappears. He sends no word. She gets no contact. He stops visiting, stops answering her letters, and eventually she has no choice but to conclude that he's screwed her over, for the second time. Fool me twice. Genuinely, I don't know how she survives believing she's been betrayed again—some mix of luck and maybe just sheer spite, that she won't let him ruin her life a second time—and honestly, even then, I have to imagine she does get help somehow. Maybe it's the bartender, maybe it's Vincent, maybe I'm just grasping at straws because I cannot imagine how she gets through her sentence believing she's been abandoned by everyone who promised to help her, AGAIN.

But regardless of how it happens, we know she did survive it. We know she got out of prison. And so at some point—from Vincent or the bartender or the goddamn newspaper—she would have found out exactly why Hugo disappeared on her.

Now, for one, this is still Hugo's fault. I'm not saying he should have done otherwise, but he did still choose to pursue this knowing that someone was relying on him, and that this could get him killed and leave her in the lurch. It's not his fault for getting murdered, and I'm sure he didn't intend to be killed, but like. He still took that risk. And while he was not obligated to tell Sandra this (and likely wouldn't couldn't have, given the whole prison thing) it does mean that he's put her in the worst possible position. Even if he didn't mean to do that to her, she's still got very good reason to be very mad at him. And for two, critically, none of this has anything to do with Peter. Given the circumstances, his old boss quite likely was involved or at least knew about it, but even if Karla was, by the time Hugo was investigating the scandal Peter was, presumably, trying to go straight. He wouldn't have been near any of this, and frankly, even if he was and he did for any reason want Hugo dead, there is no world where Peter "yeah it was me I did it stop looking at my friend now" Wagner screws over Sandra like that. Between the two of them, Sandra should be far angrier at Hugo.

But Hugo's dead. And Peter's not.

There are plenty of reasons why Peter and Sandra might have stopped talking to each other. Peter is the one who tells us that he failed to keep a promise, not Sandra, and the most we get from her is that "he made it very clear where his priorities lie." That's not very specific. But we know from the first game that Sandra does not take well to being abandoned by those she thought were on her side. And if the person she's most likely to be mad at is dead, and her other friend stayed away for both of their sakes, and the end result is that she was left alone, again—well. It's not fair, to expect Peter to have somehow prevented any of this. But I wouldn't blame her for not being fair.