“Oh, Buffy, what happened?”  Joyce held up a pair of pants and fingered a tear in one knee, crisp with dried blood.  “These were brand new!  Did you fall?”

Buffy ached to curl up in her mother’s lap and cry out all of her pain and confusion.  To tell her mother how and why the man she loved became a monster.  To confess the one thing she never could, that she was the Slayer, the girl chosen to walk in the world of nightmares. 

But she let them both take comfort in pretense instead.

“Sorry, Mom.  I’ll be more careful.”