But there were also noticeable improvements. Her eyes were still shell-shocked, but at least they didn't look quite so wounded . Her lips were quirked in a tentative half smile—a long way from the old days, when her smile would have brightened up the whole of my dark, dingy doss, but still a vast improvement from just a few months ago. The pain was still there—the pain that had prompted the choices that, in turn, had directed the course of her life. And the pain that those choices had caused her. That pain would probably always be there, I realized sadly. But there was a major change for the better. Now she felt pain; before, she had been pain ... and there's one frag of a big difference. These days, I could look into her eyes without wincing.