Allison hates that, too. Hates the way his hands dig into the chairs and his shoulders go rigid and he holds perfectly still. Like if he wills it harder enough she'll just vanish from where she's standing and he can go right on shutting her out of this. Even though she somehow ended up right there, right where he didn't want her to be. Even when she didn't know it was him.

Has she ever not known who he was?
Maybe not. Especially now.

(How did she know? Because. It's Luther.
She knew him even when she was blind.)

She knows him. Like breathing. Like there wasn't half a lifetime between those years and this last one. She knows they've lived, changed, but he hasn't, they haven't, too. She knows who she expected to find when she came home that day, and that she never expected what she saw in the foyer the night of that fight.

But she also knows, so deep her bones can't rip it out, that he's still the person, right now, today, sitting right there, that she'd trade the whole of the moon for. Once. A dozen times. A million. This face. This voice. The strength, and the rare guileless gentleness under it. That she's as terrified of losing him to the gatekeepers of this place as she is about forgetting even the smallest things about Claire as time drags on.

So you want to put your life at risk for vanity now?

She'd been so late. That night. That morning. So late. She'd almost lost him, for real and for good. So many years earlier. She'd never even known until then, and even then her only question had been why hadn't it been her. Then, it was no one, and now, it was everyone else who found it worth five minutes of their scrolling time.