I looked at him.
“What he said to you yesterday,” Sebastian said. “About taking care of me.” He kept his eyes on the garden. “I’ve been sitting with that since last night. The specific — strangeness of it. That Julian Reyes, in a visiting room behind glass, after everything he did, said that.”
“He meant it,” I said. “That was the thing that surprised me most. It was the one moment in the entire conversation where the performance dropped.”
“Why do you think he said it?”
I turned my coffee cup in my hands and thought about Julian across the glass — the dark focused eyes, the surface that gave almost nothing away, the two seconds when something underneath the surface had shown itself before the composure returned.
“I think,” I said carefully, “that Julian spent two years studying Sebasti
