Vivienne's POV
I told Lyla first.
Not because she was the most important of the three but because she was the one who would receive it most cleanly, without the immediate reactive energy that Maya brought to significant information or the analytical framework that Ella would deploy before the sentence was fully finished.
Lyla listened the way she always listened. Completely and without interruption. When I finished she was quiet for a moment and then she said, "I know." Two words carrying the specific weight of someone who had been watching something develop from close proximity and had arrived at the conclusion before being told it.
"You knew," I said.
"I suspected," she said. "Since the kitchen at your place. When he looked at you and you looked away first." A pause. "That was new.
