"I know," she replies, immediate and certain. More than maybe she has a right to be. It's not all for his benefit; she needs to believe it herself, and part of her just knows that as long as she doesn't have to hide from him like she initially thought, for those first agonizing minutes, she was going to, that she can handle whatever this place throws at her.
But being okay and being happy aren't even a little the same, so there's also that. There's no pretending this place is anything like the farmhouse or the penthouse she dreamed into existence, the first places she ever felt safe in her whole life. Somehow she thinks of when Daryl returned to Teleios after that short absence -- short, from her perspective, but over a year (she's guessing, eight months at the prison plus whatever came after) for him. How he didn't want to settle in, at first, didn't even want to stay in the house to sleep. She never got to see how he reacted to losing the prison, but she doesn't imagine it'd be too different. And that's how she's feeling now: out of place, like she wants to crawl out of her skin... but, she's used to that feeling, or she was once, so she just handles it. What she probably needs is to go cry for a while, but there never seems to be time, at least not in her head which is crammed full of checklists and escape routes and contingency plans.
She's not trying to push Daryl away, she can only hope after all they've come through that he realizes it. It's just difficult to knock herself out of survival mode and into being an actual, feeling human being right now.
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But being okay and being happy aren't even a little the same, so there's also that. There's no pretending this place is anything like the farmhouse or the penthouse she dreamed into existence, the first places she ever felt safe in her whole life. Somehow she thinks of when Daryl returned to Teleios after that short absence -- short, from her perspective, but over a year (she's guessing, eight months at the prison plus whatever came after) for him. How he didn't want to settle in, at first, didn't even want to stay in the house to sleep. She never got to see how he reacted to losing the prison, but she doesn't imagine it'd be too different. And that's how she's feeling now: out of place, like she wants to crawl out of her skin... but, she's used to that feeling, or she was once, so she just handles it. What she probably needs is to go cry for a while, but there never seems to be time, at least not in her head which is crammed full of checklists and escape routes and contingency plans.
She's not trying to push Daryl away, she can only hope after all they've come through that he realizes it. It's just difficult to knock herself out of survival mode and into being an actual, feeling human being right now.