The speaker addresses someone absent or dead, a thing, a place, or an idea, as if they could hear.
In Dom Casmurro
Childhood confessions, you would have been worth two or three pages, but I want to be spared.
The narrator addresses the "Childhood Confessions" themselves as if they were a person present, with the "you," and the tone of longing and cutting off grows out of this intimate treatment of a memory.
Chapters XIII to XXII: Capitu, the Wall, and the Plan, the narrator