Pam watches Bill digging Jessica's grave for awhile, but eventually gets bored and starts checking out the body's tits and ass, puling up her dress to look at her panties. Bill if totally offended, but Pam just sighs. "It's your own fault. You and your insane affection for stupid cattle." She's still wearing her sunglasses on her head; every day is Halloween. He tells her to go away and she says she's there on Magister's orders. "I fulfilled the conditions of my sentence! I murdered this innocent girl!" Pam totally scoffs at him, because once somebody's decided to hate themselves you can't really argue with it. "There was no murder. You drained her blood and gave her yours." He says however you say it, that's proof of his loyalty, but she's still not leaving: he's romantic and sentimental and kind of a dumbass, and who knows what he'll do rather than letting Jessica be born. "You just might do something to keep the little blood bag from joining our ranks. I'll follow my orders; I won't let you stake her before she goes to ground." He drops the shovel and stares at her, promising he's not going to stake her: "I'm gonna set her free," he says, and his face goes unsure. Is that something Pam needs to know? Is that something she can even understand? She loves being a vampire. Her story started there.

Lorena turned Bill as a reward for his gentility. If anyone's spirit deserves to stay in the world eternally, it's a gentleman. The fact that he was seriously traumatized by it isn't his fault, but the fact that centuries later he's still whining about it is most certainly his fault. So this is his worst nightmare coming true: taking possession of somebody else's choices. Killing a girl to save her from torture. She went looking for danger, and she found it. Jessica's parents were trying to keep her safe, her body and her soul safe, but she knew she knew better than them. She knew she was risking her safety, and she was right. We don't always choose the things that happen to us, but we always choose how we respond.

So now Jessica is dead, because Bill killed her. And whatever happens next is up to her. And if he doesn't agree with it, that's on him, because the time for him taking her choices away is over. And if he could see that for one second -- that Jessica's story belongs to Jessica now, that she's the main character in it, that it's not about self-loathing or self-hatred or self-denial unless she chooses that -- then Lorena could never hurt him again.

"You've already set her free. The same as Eric freed me." Bill tells Jessica's story, but it is not Jessica's story, and Bill will never understand that other people have their own stories, because his pain is too large to look over: "Everyone she's ever known will recoil from her. Everything she's ever loved has been stolen from her." Pam refuses to call her by name, because she's dead, "a pathetic lump of temporary flesh," and Bill hates it, but Pam's right. Because in Pam's story, before Jessica was dead, she was even less alive than she is now. I'm on Pam's side, because the thing has happened. Jessica died. And we choose how we respond to that.