Jules wished she had something to do with her hands. Maybe she should have taken the offered blondie earlier, even if she did have plenty more at home. "My family doesn't like me very much," she said. "So we have at least one thing in common."
She had meant it as her own mood-lightener—it was easier if she could laugh at it, and it hurt less to say out loud than to think of in the middle of the night—but Sauvage said, "I'm sorry to hear that," with, she was pretty sure, absolute sincerity. Today was proving to be full of surprises.
Despite her parents' dissatisfaction with just about everything she wanted to be or do, they were staunchly committed to keeping her under close enough watch to most efficiently express their disapproval, and so she'd lived with them in the city her whole life, up until she hadn't. She had a job, but they kept a tight hold on most of her money, and would take note of any purchases they disapproved of, with a strong emphasis on anything she might like to read.
She'd developed a variety of workarounds for this, including camping out at the library on days her parents were out of town, and keeping books hidden at work; but some things were not available at the library and fell outside the limited reach of her spending money. Her allowance, like she was a child. There was a bookstore on the opposite side of the city from her parents' house that stocked a number of rare or just very expensive books. Every so often—at least once a month, whenever she had time—she would slip out to read something there. For a while she'd been chipping away at a gigantic, centuries-old text about the natural history of a variety of sea creatures which was both fascinating when it got things right and hilarious when it got them wrong, which was more common.
One evening, after an especially hellish day the details of which she was not eager to share with someone she'd just met—Sauvage, thankfully, didn't press—she made it to this bookstore half an hour before it closed, intending to spend her last sliver of remaining free time there, and the book was gone.
She sat down in the aisle with her back against a full shelf and did her damnedest not to start crying, in public, over a book full of mostly nonsense that she couldn't reasonably expect to sit unsold until she had a chance to finish it. It was ridiculous, she was being ridiculous, and someone was going to hear her and then she'd have to explain or else seem even more ridiculous, and maybe she'd get kicked out for disrupting customers and never actually buying anything.
Of course, none of those thoughts made her feel any less like crying, so it wasn't really a surprise that they weren't enough to stop it from happening.
"Are you sure this is something you want to tell me about?" Sauvage said. "I don't expect you to open a vein for me."
"It's just what happened," Jules said. "I'm at peace with it." Maybe not completely at peace with everything about what her life had been, since she did occasionally see her parents, to fight with them about what she'd made of herself and how they were oh so worried about her being so far away, and to pick up sentimental things she'd left behind, but definitely with that day and what had come of it. "Anyway, I promise it'll get more uplifting, if that makes you feel better. I did end up here, after all."