The navy dress had a particular quality in the store's light. I had noticed it in the fitting room mirror, but what I had not been able to see in the fitting room mirror was the way someone else would see it and what that would look like. Matteo's face told me what it looked like. Not because his expression gave anything away, it did not. It was the same composed, neutral surface it always was, but something underneath it had shifted in a way that I was learning to read, a tightening of the jaw, a quality of stillness that was different from his regular stillness, more deliberate, more managed, the stillness of a man actively maintaining something rather than simply inhabiting it.
"That one," he said.
Two words. Completely flat.
I looked down at the dress and back at him. "I haven't dec
