The hardest part of the days that followed was not the waiting.
It was the performing.
I had spent weeks building something in secret, moving carefully through rooms and conversations and carefully managed silences, and I had grown accustomed to the particular internal discipline of that, the way you learned to keep the surface of yourself completely still while everything underneath was in motion. But there was a difference between keeping secrets in a house where people were not paying close attention and keeping secrets in a house that had begun, slowly and without announcement, to watch more carefully.
Victor was watching.
Not obviously. Not in a way that would have been visible to anyone who didn’t know what his attention looked like when it was engaged rather than performed. I ha
