I've been thinking about Samantha more than most of the others on this journey, which surprised me when I noticed it. I think it's because she's the one I feel most straightforwardly guilty about leaving.
She relies on family for connection in a way the rest of us don't, or don't have to. Her life outside the mansion is constrained in ways that most of ours aren't — the form, the telepathy, the fact that a conventional social life was never going to be available to her in the way it eventually became available to some of us. The siblings were her world in a way that was true for all of us as children and stopped being quite so true as we grew older and found other worlds to inhabit.
Except for Samantha. For whom I suspect it remained true.
I left without saying goodbye to anyone, and I've made a kind of peace with that choice for most of the people in that house. With Samantha I haven't entirely managed it. She wanted connection more than almost anyone I've ever known. She offered it freely, consistently, without requiring reciprocation in kind. She introduced you to her insects with genuine hope that you'd understand what she saw in them, and if you didn't, she wasn't diminished by it — she just kept offering.
I was someone she offered that to. And I walked out of that house in the middle of the night without a word.
She'll have had her insects. She'll have had whoever else stayed, and she is constitutionally inclined to make the best of what's available. I'm not catastrophising. But I'm also not going to pretend that leaving without saying goodbye to Samantha specifically doesn't sit differently than the rest of it.
The telepathy means she'll probably know how I feel before I find the words for it. I've decided I'm all right with that. If there's anyone in that house who can receive the full weight of a complicated feeling and respond to it without judgment, it's her.
I'm going to say it anyway. Out loud, in actual words. She deserves that much.