[Ellie shrugs, not to shrug off Lance's sympathy so much as... well, she doesn't know. She doesn't know how to accept it. It happened. It's not something that she can forget.

She's alluded to what happened after, and Lance can probably put it together, but it's more than that. She has to walk through it in her head, pull at the tangled threads of it. Not to pick at a wound, but to make sense of it.]

... Joel's brother Tommy was there too. He... tried. To talk me out of it. Kept watching me while we healed up, and after the funeral.

[Guilt aches across her chest, catches in her throat.]

I told him that if it had been us, Joel would have been halfway to Seattle by then. Chasing after them. That I was going whether he helped me or not. He begged me for just one more day, and he took off that night.

[Ellie grimaces. She's never told this part of the story- not to anyone. That Tommy wouldn't have left, if she hadn't thrown it in his face. If she hadn't turned her rage and grief on him. She may not have blamed him for it outright, but Tommy had been there, and he blamed himself.]

I don't know if he thought I wouldn't find a way to fucking go after him, or what.