"Because I don't want it to be a lie," Sookie replied immediately, feeling the whole world spin around her, feeling nausea rising up to her chest, where it pressed against her heart, hammering soundly enough that it seemed to want to jump out of her very chest. No, she didn't always do the right thing. There wasn't a right way about this, there wasn't anything better about telling him straight that she suspected him, not with the way that the very words seemed to knot her stomach, not with the way she was still so desperately clinging to a thread of hope, or need. Everything that he pointed fingers at her for, Sookie could see the rationale behind, and that swept her under a shadow of guilt as well. All the promises she'd made him, that she could accept him for whatever harm he'd done, so long as he moved forward, so long as he'd changed.

She would never know what it was like to be a vampire, and so Sookie tried to understand that as well as she could. But this wasn't about that. It wasn't about the fact that he'd killed, so much as it was about trust, and the fact that there was less of it between them than she'd hoped. Than she'd imagined. And if he lied about this, if he was able to pull that over everyone, including a best friend that had known him for far longer, what else?

Did she need to know? (But she did, a voice protested in the back of her mind. She clearly did.)

Her expression began to falter, and her throat grew tight, constricted. "I want to be wrong. I want to believe that my boyfriend really means it when he says that he doesn't know what's going on, or I want him to just tell me if he does, not buckle down because I found a fucking scrapbook in my hut," she breathed, words shaking.