Stavanger Bay Wilted

Reverie did not reject him, but neither did she press into his arms the way she often did. It wasn't coldness that kept her still but a slow wilting, something in her shriveling and numbing until she hardly felt his touch. She looked at him for a moment, and started to speak — but found that she couldn't, that she was shattering, that she could not stop and would not stop until it had all turned to fine gilded dust.
How could she do anything else when her husband had finally seen plainly the truth of her love for him, and rejected it so fully, so desperately? And maybe — maybe she was wrong to love him the way she did, to pin all of her hopes and all of her fears on him — but Reverie knew no other way to love, and it seemed very much to her as if Lestan must have known, in some way, even before this. Why else would he threaten her with his absence, if not for the knowledge that in this way he could control her? Even now he glossed over it, as if he had never truly intended to leave her, as if he had known all along that this would break her. It had suited him well enough until it had been turned on him. And now —
Not him, he insisted, and so it would not be him, not anymore. Her final act of passion for him would be a shattering, the last shattering, and even this Reverie did for love of her husband. It would have been easy, she thought, to hold on; to grasp at him with burning hands, always burning, until there was nothing left of him but a flash of light and drifting smoke. But she knew that wasn't what he wanted, not anymore. So she would let him go.
Now Reverie truly detached herself from the present. A familiar haze started to come over her, the grief of loss gently pulling and beckoning her to safety. I'd like to see my daughter now, She whispered as she slowly faded, eyes desolate and clouding as she looked at Lestan. Then she pulled away from him, to go to Blossom. For Blossom. Not me. So be it.
She did not speak again for the rest of the night.