The Smile
Petra Voss did not storm. She did not raise her voice. She did not gather people in rooms and make announcements.
She moved the way cold water moves, quietly, without appearing to move at all, finding every c***k and filling it before you noticed it was wet.
I didn't know any of it was happening.
That was the thing I would turn over later, in the dark, in the basement room with the thin cot and the ceiling too low and the one window that showed me nothing but grass and the underside of the sky. I would turn it over and over and ask myself how I missed it, and the answer was always the same: because I was not the one she was talking to.
She started at breakfast.
I was in the kitchen when she passed through on her way to the east sitting room, where two of the senior pack wiv
