“Person,” Ilde gasps, for all that it's pointless in that Wolfgang may not register it yet and there's not a chance in hell that she'll hear any theoretical response to this clever observation. “That was-- a person.”

Or what used to be one, what's left behind afterwards; the anger and the sorrow that was left in her wake, the familiar sense of something intimately familiar to Ilde that nevertheless feels like a violation to touch on in the river, where she has felt safe and powerful and good. She can't think about it clearly, but as they drag themselves out of the water it isn't her earlier outrage that lingers but a familiar and unasked for bone-deep weariness, the kind you can't weep for because there is a hollow place where that impulse used to be.

You never find anything pretty where it was.