[She's frowning, but it's a confused expression more than anything else.] Why not do something they'd be proud of?
[And, strangely, she doesn't mean the question patronizingly: she's actually curious. She knows it's terrible, that she probably should feel worse about it in this sense, but although she'd loved her father when she'd been younger, he'd gotten more and more unlike the man she'd known when she was small, and while he didn't really scare her, she didn't know how to act around him. Her mother had been more or less the same, although she'd just been quiet and withdrawn and maybe old fashioned, and so while she hated what happened and did miss them... In other ways, she almost didn't. More like she missed the idea of parents, or the people they had been before things had gotten bad.
Was it the same for him, if the only way he could feel close to his parents was to imagine them being disappointed in him? Or was it something else?]
Re: Spam
[And, strangely, she doesn't mean the question patronizingly: she's actually curious. She knows it's terrible, that she probably should feel worse about it in this sense, but although she'd loved her father when she'd been younger, he'd gotten more and more unlike the man she'd known when she was small, and while he didn't really scare her, she didn't know how to act around him. Her mother had been more or less the same, although she'd just been quiet and withdrawn and maybe old fashioned, and so while she hated what happened and did miss them... In other ways, she almost didn't. More like she missed the idea of parents, or the people they had been before things had gotten bad.
Was it the same for him, if the only way he could feel close to his parents was to imagine them being disappointed in him? Or was it something else?]