the trauma that gets said because no one is receiving it — "Mario kept saying Golly Ned, all…"

Millicent unspools the worst thing that ever happened to her, the father capering in her leotard, the scholarship taken purely to escape him, and Mario answers with tripod pan-head specifications and "Golly Ned." It reads as pure non-reception, two sincere people and nothing crossing between them, yet the odd tenderness of the scene is that she can only say the unsayable because Mario is the one listener who will never comprehend it enough to judge or weaponize it. The confession lands nowhere, and that is exactly what makes it safe to make.