Dorothy Cole had learned to be honest the hard way, which is the only reliable way to learn it.
The easy version of honesty — the kind people performed in public, in apologies, in confessions timed to produce the maximum relational benefit — she had mastered before she was twelve. She had watched her parents operate in that register for her entire childhood and had absorbed it the way children absorb everything: through proximity, through repetition, through the slow accumulation of understanding that the family's dominant currency was not love but the strategic deployment of its appearance.
The hard version of honesty was different. The hard version was what happened in the secure apartment in the third week of October when she ran out of anyone to perform for and had to sit with the un
