Allison doesn't move for a second. She knows it because it feels jarring as sheering some part of a glacier off when her throat finally swallows after those words he said. As though Luther had any clue about what he'd just said so easily. Implied. Impaled into her.

(For a moment, she in the hallway, and on the steps, and pulling away in a cab.
For a moment, she's in her kitchen with Ray, pulling the red ribbon free.)

"Yeah, maybe." If she didn't count the other thing she'd wanted more. The one worth waiting years not to follow her dream, years in the place she didn't want to be. The one that never came true even if she could have named it to before wanting to act. (The one she still couldn't give up on, in her own words.)

"It didn't make it happen easy. Or immediately." Even if she had softened her path in ways other people couldn't. "And making a career out of it for a decade, while balancing everything else that came with it, took a long time to figure out. There were a million other little things involved in it that I could never have guessed at before."