Hi papillote,
Mailice back with another review!
I like the pace here in the first half. I think you did a good job of portraying the "conversation" (let's call it interview or questioning) with Mike. I really like Bitter here. She comes across as pushy and grumpy during the explanations. I like the conversation very much as they stand in the car park and I remain very pleased with the portrayal of Mike. He is not happy that she is now asking him for information but continues to dwell on his neurotic streak.
I found the second half a bit too short and not as clearly developed. I can imagine Graves not wanting to talk to Bitter at this time of night, but I think you could still expand on the conversation a bit, or the setting. I would have expected, after meeting Graves and how Bitter portrayed him, that there would be some new information there, like she hints at something about his tee-shirt. Maybe that it's cleaner than she would have expected or something.
In general I found it a good chapter, but also had the impression that the moments with Graves are over so quickly that I wonder why they don't learn more about him or do anything else for him. At the moment he seems like a character that could be exchanged with any police officer at the station, where Bitter could also see the file.
Other points that caught my eye:
It made a dull, "Toc toc."
It's funny that you keep that in inverted commas, since it's neither dialogue nor a statement, just a sound. Keeping it in italics is sufficient there and think that then the comma doesn't need to be used either.
I stunk of cooking oil and sweat, and I was tired, grumpy.
The insertion of grumpy here at the end reads a bit short and strange in relation to the sentence as a whole. I would either insert and or make it a separate sentence, as it would better represent Bitter's current emotional state. Short and sweet.
Scrying isn't an exact science. Visions are subject to interpretation. If the object of your Scrying is too personal, what you See is skewed.
I don't know why the "See" is capitalised here. It's not a generic term like Scrying or Vision and I think putting it in italic would be sufficient here.
"He's right," I told Mrs Graves. "Your neighbourhood sucks."
That gave me a laugh.
They had love - I didn't.
As the last chapter told more about Bitter's childhood, I wonder if this whole thing of love she thinks she doesn't have isn't ultimately a product of herself. She assumes that her mother didn't want to do anything with her and her brother after what happened, and think that led to Bitter searching for an answer as a child to understand what was happening and came to the conclusion that she wasn't loved or there was no reason to love her. Since it was already shown in the first chapters that Bitter builds herself a bit of walls to stay away from others to avoid being hurt, I strongly assume that she put this in her own mind and it manifested itself via brain development in her teenage years. She is not solely to blame for this, of course, but a child's brain is so easily fooled and manipulated that this could be some kind of result....
Have fun writing!
Mailice
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