Gately's dreams: Mrs. Waite, and Death — "It’s not like he’d like mourned…"
It’s not like he’d like mourned Mrs. Waite, or missed her, or even thought about her even once for many years after that. Which is what makes it somehow worse that his next, even more unpleasant Joelle van Dyne pain-and-fever dream takes place in what is, unmistakably and unavoidably, Mrs. Waite’s kitchen, in great detail, right down to the ceiling’s light-fixture full of dried bugs, the brimming ashtrays, the bar-graph of stacked Globes, the maddening arrhythmic drip of the kitchen sink and the bad smell—a mixture of mildew and putrid fruit.
Context
The scene's memory-thesis in a paragraph turn: a past never mourned, never revisited — and the second framed dream rebuilds it wholesale, to the light-fixture and the drip. Everything was kept; conscious recall just never had the key. The deep archive outlasting its index.