The corridor was so quiet I could hear the fire in the main hall breathing three rooms away.
I looked at Rowan and he looked at me and the space between us was full of something that had not been there sixty seconds ago. Something with weight and edges and consequence and no clean way through it except forward.
"That," he had said, "depends entirely on what you tell me next."
I thought about lying.
I was good at it. Not the loud kind of lying, not fabrication and performance, but the quiet kind. The lying of omission. The careful art of not saying the thing that would draw attention, not saying the thing that would confirm what someone already suspected, not saying the thing that would cost me the only safety I had left. I had been doing it since I was old enough to understand that tru
