@thycarnifex gets approached by callie after the compound
The Sadecki family had quite a crash course in pretending things were normal lately, hadn't they? It didn't exactly surprise Callie, as she'd grown up knowing her mother was always hiding things about her past, acting as if she'd gotten over them. As if the ghost of Jackie Taylor wasn't plastered to their walls, as if Google searches didn't tell the girl more about her mother's life than the woman herself ever did.
And then there was this whole Adam situation and Callie had tried her best to get with the pretending. Surely it ran in the family, right? She was still so embarrassed about being used by the cop like that, just when she finally felt like she'd gotten one over on Shauna in their weird little game of trying to get control over things. Maybe that was all Callie wanted -- a sense of control, like her entire existence wasn't being dictated by someone else's trauma. By a cult of traumatized soccer players in their early 40s, whether they realized it or not.
Maybe that's why pretending now that nothing happened back in the woods when Callie finally saw the truth for herself -- if there was even truth to be found in all of the confusion -- was making her itch. Her mom couldn't lie about this anymore, couldn't pretend like it wasn't real and wasn't actively ruining everyone's lives.
"So, are we just not gonna talk about how those women were going to fucking kill you?" Callie blurted out on a quiet afternoon at home, catching Shauna in moment of mundane routine. She looked at her mom with a mixture of hurt and concern widening her eyes and creasing her brows.
"Are we going to just pretend everything's fine again when it's obviously not? Mom, you were really going to die, weren't you?"
