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He wonders when’s the right time - to collect pictures, to put that bottle of perfume away.
Her night gown is still splayed in the white settee on their bedroom ( the one with its back to the window, where she used to lay with Men right after school - tales of his achievements made love spill from the corners of her eyes, and she’d just squeeze her little joy in her arms ) which, to be fair, was a very rare occurrence but one that made him chuckle whenever he’d walk into the place to find traces of his wife still around.
Jeanne likes - she liked, he reminds himself - things neat and in place. Jeanne liked open spaces, wide halls after half a lifetime being hugged by nothing but iron spikes. Jeanne kept every space free to see her heart soar around (after school, in the afternoon she’d spin around in the main hall with her son in her arms), enamoured with her life.
Ren remembers, and he swears when he remembers the love he had and the same love that had been ripped from his hands - hands that now clench into fists when the image of Men’s most loved person on earth runs right through his mind as she lays next to shattered vases and drowns in red crimson floors.
Ren also remembers - it really hadn’t been that long ago - the way his son had clung to his mother’s clothes (that frilly apron that still hung onto the smell of cookies and her sweet fruity lotion that perfectly masked the remains of gunpowder and the iron of her blood); the way he had crawled every night into his parent’s bed chasing whatever crumbs of her spirit were left.
Spoiler: there was none, or at least none left for them .
Perhaps there was no right time to let half of his heart go.
Perhaps - time wasn’t real at all (he thinks, in the vulnerability of his room: that imposibles can come true), and if time wasn’t real neither was the tragedy that took his all.
Funny how things work - it was the twisting of time that in the end took his Jeanne’s life.
It’s a sort of relief when in love and in grief he realizes that there’s no pressure - no right moment to say goodbye.
(Shamans rarely do, they just say “see you on the other side”).